fear and love
by dqgilly
Summary: Talking about Romeo and Juliet in Muggle Studies seems like a waste of time, if they're all being honest. "I'm very confused, Lily." "About the television?" "About how you could think that Romeo and Juliet is just about two stupid kids who made one too many mistakes." Slow burn, focusing a lot on the impacts the war has on a bunch of seventh-years just trying to live their lives.
1. part one

The sky was so pretty that night, Lily Evans didn't mind feeling like a cliché. A pretty girl lost in her thoughts, leaned against the cold stone of the Astronomy Tower: it was hardly unique, but it was very possible that Lily was the person at Hogwarts who cared the very least about how unique she was.

Maybe she would care in the morning, for it was a considerably cold October night and she definitely didn't need to be losing any sleep, but the way the sky opened up for her right then was much more important than that. It felt bright out despite the late hour, and she suspected it had something to do with the milky white clouds lazing across the grounds.

When she'd first lived at the castle—six years ago now—Lily was convinced that everything about Hogwarts was magic, not just the spells and the ghosts and the paintings that moved: the dew on the grass, the murky water of the lake, the wind moving through the trees. Looking back, she was certain she'd spent the duration of her first month at the school staring into the distance.

_Maybe that's where the blasted reputation came from in the first place_, she wondered. Quickly, though, she shook her head as if it would launch the thought from her mind.

She could see Venus between the clouds, outshining everything around it.

Sometimes Lily missed muggle science. It was frustrating to only talk about the planets as cogs in some cosmic machine of fate. Particularly, Lily hated the topic of _Venus_ at Hogwarts; it always ended up being about love.

Nothing real at all—just gossip and hopes and wishes hiding behind the stars.

That's why she liked to seek the planet out in the sky. No matter how much meaning and metaphor they tried to cover it with, it was easy to remind herself that it was only a planet suspended among stars, not some mystical force. Not everything needed to be magic.

It wasn't as if magic had been very kind to her lately, anyways.

.

"I see Head Girl's broken curfew again," Marlene Price commented wryly, the top of her head all that was visible from behind the worn couch. Had Lily been more attentive, the sound of the still-crackling fire would've told her that people were still in the common room, but she was far too deep in her own thoughts to notice.

"Why are you still up?" Lily asked her friend in a hushed, confused tone. She saw the head of long brown hair rested against Marlene's shoulder as she walked to the front of the couch and understanding crossed her tired face. "Another one?"

The blonde nodded wearily. "October's been tough for some reason. She was fine last month…" Despite the fact that she was asleep, Mary MacDonald looked more exhausted than the other two girls combined. Marlene dropped the line of thought. "Wanna talk? Quietly, I mean."

Lily laughed softly, turning to sit in front of the orange glow of the fire. "I'm alright."

"Aren't trips to the Astronomy Tower meant to be for troubled thoughts?"

"What makes you think I was at the Astronomy Tower?"

"Oh, sorry, I assumed. Out shagging the boy of the night, then?"

Lily turned to roll her eyes, confident that the room was too dimly lit for her friend to notice the blush on her cheeks. "Spot-on as usual, Sherlock."

"I still haven't read any of those books, you know, despite how often you use that funny little man's name to insult me."

"I think that says more about you than me."

Marlene was silent for a second. "You're probably right."

If it were a different time, and Lily had not been so tired, or Mary had not looked so fragile, she would have been content to sit there for another hour, talking about nothing. As it was, her only retort was a yawn. "I'm heading to bed," she said before it was quite finished, standing up and stretching somewhat obnoxiously. With the fire behind her, she was cast almost entirely in shadow; her hair was the only thing left of her that stood out, cascading almost violently red against the light.

"Sleep well, Evans," Marlene said as the girl walked away. Then, she looked down at Mary's half-obscured face and did her best not to worry.

This couldn't go on forever.

.

James was the hungriest he'd been in seventeen years.

The walk to the Great Hall for breakfast seemed to last ages, even halfway down when he'd challenged Sirius and Peter to a race. Remus probably would have demolished the lot of them—Merlin knew how the boy managed to run so quickly—but he'd gone down to breakfast early today, claiming that he wanted to work on an essay for Ancient Runes that was due after lunch. A table filled with breakfast food seemed like an odd choice of work stations, but James had been too groggy to bother him about it.

As he passed through the large doorways, his stomach grumbled menacingly. _A table filled with breakfast food_, he thought again with more zeal, overwhelmed by the smell of it. The space and time between the door and the table somehow eluded him then; he didn't think again until he had eaten half of the food on his plate—which in all fairness did not take long.

Once he was better satiated, James slowed down to take in the happenings of the table. Sirius was bothering Remus, who had taken up a sizeable amount of space with his books and parchment, and Peter was stirring something into the former's pudding while he was busy. He noticed James's glance and winked. "It'll only turn his teeth blue for an hour or two."

It would be funnier on another day—and it would certainly be funnier later today, when Sirius realised—but now, James gave him a distracted grin and moved on.

Lily was sat next to Mary, spreading marmalade on a piece of toast and laughing. The pair of them were always unreal next to each other, both so…well…_pretty_, James thought, but they were off-kilter today. Not worse, exactly, just sort of unsettled. Sort of fragile.

Lily caught his eye and glared at him. James laughed. He might have imagined it, but the light in her green eyes was more joking than angry.

Adam McKinnon was reading the Daily Prophet like he always did. Lowering his spectacles to catch a glimpse, James made out the headline:

**SEVEN AURORS DEAD IN TARGETED ATTACK.**

His sausage turned to ash in his mouth. Not literally, because of course that could be accomplished with a rather simple spell, but at that moment James couldn't have told the difference.

It wasn't her. He knew that, and it was always the first thing he thought when he saw headlines like this, but it never saved his stomach from a moment of free-fall.

"You alright, Prongsy?" Sirius asked in a girlish tone, apparently done tormenting Remus. "You've hardly touched your food, 'cept for the bacon, the eggs, the scone, the sausages..."

James wasn't sure how convincing his laugh was.

Not that it needed to be that convincing at all; nobody was genuinely concerned. His stomach turned.

"Don't mean to be fussy, Padfoot," he pouted. "Just not too hungry today."

.

Sometimes, Lily regretted the heavy courseload she'd decided to take on for seventh year. She loved everything she was taking—she hadn't done it just to spice up her resume, unlike a lot of students—but after the first week of classes it became apparent that she would never have to worry about having too much free time.

"Thank Merlin this class isn't a NEWT," she said, perhaps not entirely aware of the words as they left her mouth. She liked that Muggle Studies didn't come with an exam tied to its tail; the class was interesting, and Lily had a suspicion that part of the reason she liked it so much was how low-stress it was.

"Thank you, Lily, for this brand-new sentiment," Mary replied, shaking her head. The sarcasm went almost entirely over her head, though, as she noticed that the skin under her friend's eyes was tinged purple. Either she'd forgotten to apply a glamour charm that morning or it was already wearing off.

"One that you absolutely haven't given every day since the school year began," Marlene added, making Lily blushed. They tended to act this way when she talked about class.

"You don't have to be an arse about it."

"I disagree wholeheartedly," she said with a smile, her messy blonde hair falling into her face.

"Somebody's feeling especially bitchy this morning," Mary smiled back.

"Oi, you were on my side a second ago!"

"What, can't a girl change their mind?" She asked. "That is, as long as they're not changing their mind about how _glad_ they are that Muggle Studies isn't a NEWT level class."

"Clever," Lily muttered, but it was hard to hear over the laughter of the other girls.

They were still laughing at her by the time they reached their seats. At some point, Lily had joined in.

"I hope you girls are laughing about Romeo and Juliet," An older witch with long brown hair said as she entered the classroom. Then she frowned. "Actually, no. I hope you were _not _laughing about Romeo and Juliet."

"Was it _not_ a comedy, professor?" Sirius asked from his seat.

"I'd ask if you read the book at all, Mr. Black, but I've long abandoned silly hopes like that."

Lily glanced behind her just in time to see the affronted look spread across his face. "Matilda Cuffe, I'm insulted that you would even say something so unkind!"

"You can call me Matilda once you've actually read a book I assign you, Sirius."

"Well, Romeo and Juliet was a very interesting read. I felt that it very neatly captured the whirlwind nature of young love, and how easily it turns catastrophic," he said with a mockingly contemplative expression, stopping just short of stroking an imaginary goatee. He grinned as resignation filled her eyes. "_Matilda."_

The James and Remus dissolved into laughter with him, and Lily couldn't keep in her own laughter for a moment. Sirius had a knack for most timings, be they comedic or dramatic.

Professor Cuffe sat down at her desk, rubbing her temples. "You'll be the death of me, Black."

"It's an honor, professor."

After giving the class a moment to settle down, the professor stood. "We are going to be discussing the play today, so I hope you've all thought about this as much as Mr. Black clearly has."

The students were all silent for a moment. Lily decided it would probably be best if she stayed out of the discussion, settling down in her seat and looking at the backs of her hands. Even without the forest green varnish on her nails, she found her hands quite interesting to stare at; she usually searched her freckles for patterns and constellations.

"I liked it," A Hufflepuff girl said hesitantly, as if she were making a confession. "I thought it was really moving to watch. Like, how everything was against these two kids who just wanted to be together."

Lily bit her lip. She wasn't sure she would give such a sentimental interpretation.

"I agree, Ramona," James added to the quiet room. Everybody turned to look at him. Everybody always looked at James Potter when he decided to speak—which was often—but today was a bit different. "They're perfectly in love, but the world they live in is so filled with hate that they have no way of surviving it."

Lily frowned.

"That's very romantic of you, Potter," Marlene said, slumped down in her seat.

"You don't agree?" He sounded genuinely surprised.

"I think they're bloody idiots."

"Language, Ms. Price," Professor Cuffe interrupted.

"Took the words right out of my mouth," Sirius said, locking eyes with her from across the room. Marlene shook her head as if to deny the connection.

"I'm not agreeing with you on purpose, Black."

"Merlin, of course not! I'm just proud," he said. "You're more reasonable than I thought."

"It's hard to find, but I know there's a reason for me to be insulted somewhere in there," she said warily.

"I'm insulted that you'd think that."

"It's like a dragon eating its own damn tail," Remus muttered, rolling his eyes. "Could we move on?"

Sirius stuck his tongue out at the boy, prompting him to smile, perhaps against his better judgement.

"Well, my reluctance to agree with Black aside," Marlene pressed on, "I do think they're stupid about it. Romeo's just hopping from one girl to the next as fast as they'll line up, and Juliet thinks he's just _peachy_ and _has _to marry him like, the day they meet."

"It was love at first sight!" Mary complained. Lily winced. In an attempt to divert more of her attention to her hands, she looked at the calluses formed by her wand, trying to imagine how many times she'd held it in the exact same way.

"Juliet would've been what, a third year? How could that possibly be true love?"

"And Romeo would've been a sixth year!" A Ravenclaw boy added quickly. "Any bloke who pulled that here would never hear the end of it—it's downright creepy."

"It was a different time! Age didn't matter as much back then," the Hufflepuff from earlier, Ramona, protested.

"The fact that they're from a couple centuries ago doesn't make the situation any better," Lily said, her hands forgotten on her desk.

She very much disliked the stillness her words brought to the room.

"Really, Lily? You think they're just idiots?" Ramona—who was apparently feeling very outspoken today—asked curiously. Lily wanted to take the words back, despite how much she meant them. It wasn't what the room wanted to hear from her.

Perhaps Professor Cuffe noticed the change in atmosphere, or simply the stress in Lily's expression, because she spoke up before any reply could come. "Well, you lot are certainly more…excited about the play than I expected."

This got everybody to settle down, and made Lily feel unusually grateful. This topic was making her uncomfortable for a reason she didn't quite understand; she was ready to move on.

"I think we're going to have to spend more time on this," she continued, a smile beginning to spread on her face. Her dark eyes sparkled.

Lily was going to have to find a more interesting distraction than her hands.

.

"She's lost her mind if you ask me," Marlene said.

"She's mad," James agreed, falling back onto the couch right in front of the fire.

The Gryffindor common room was empty, given the late hour, but the seventh years felt there was no better time to meet, unhindered by the shouts of first-years and the chaos of third-year magic. The fire kept everything warm and glowing orange and comfortable. They all seemed to have trouble sleeping lately, but nobody ever mentioned it. Some nights they would sit saying absolutely nothing; those nights tended to be Lily's favorites.

"That said, I think this is going to be _incredibly_ fun."

"Talking about the same muggle book for an entire month isn't going to be fun, Prongs, it's going to be a waste of damn time," Sirius complained.

The conversation was turning very quickly. Her instinct was to turn to the fire, let herself get lost in it, but she couldn't do that every time the play came up; especially not if they were going to be talking about it in class.

For an entire bloody _month_.

Even on a normal night, though, it was hard to resist. She watched a glowing log crumble.

"She's going to make your class do that? Really?" Peter asked in disbelief, eyebrows high, for the first time glad he didn't take Muggle Studies with everybody else.

"Sirius started it, with all of his waxing poetic to 'Matilda'." Evidently, Marlene wasn't in the mood for his theatrics that night.

ARGUE

"It won't be the end of the world," Remus rolled his eyes, turning to snatch Sirius's hand before he stole James's glasses from the top of his head.

"If this is going to be one of your lectures on the wonders of education and our responsibility to be mindful and dedicated students, can I give it a raincheck?" Sirius tilted his head back against the couch, closing his eyes. "I already have a headache."

"I have _never_ given a lecture like that," He protested. "I prefer 'the_ real_ magic is knowledge', if I'm going to go down that road."

"Shooting pains behind my eyes, mate."

"You should really stop spiking your own pumpkin juice."

"Wicked joke, Moony," he said dryly. "Could you shut up?"

It was more inflammatory than endearing, in Lily's opinion, but Remus gave a dim smile.

The conversation kicked back up around her, and for a moment there were too many voices. Everything was spinning around her, and everybody was thinking, and everybody wanted to be heard. She wondered, quite absently, if they were all as worried as she was.

They had to be, of course. They were all still awake.

The fire was only looking more inviting. Lily wondered, not for the first time, what spells there were to make things inflammable. She wondered if there were any that worked on people. If she could, she would shower in flames; it would be nice.

"You alright?" Mary asked quietly, jarring Lily out of her head. She nodded slightly.

"Just tired."

"You could go to bed, you know," she commented, rolling her eyes.

"Are you tired of hearing that?" Lily couldn't help but ask.

Mary sighed, her bangs fluttering at the gesture. Her glamour charm and makeup had both worn off entirely for the day. She looked a special sort of tired—the kind that settled into the bones, that never wanted to leave—and it was all wrong on her. Mary MacDonald seemed frail on a good day; under exhaustion it wouldn't have been surprising to see her shatter. "So tired of it."

.

"She's really going all-out on this, isn't she?" A Ravenclaw, Kerry Hawthorne, asked. She was walking the line between amusement and boredom, unsure of which direction her classmates would agree with.

The Muggle Studies classroom was always lively. It hosted a very odd, very intriguing collection of objects both magical and mundane. Enchanted quills furiously revised first-year essays in the back of the room; telephones swung by their chords from receivers, propelled by some invisible wind; unmoving photographs littered the walls; near the front of the professor's desk sat a rubber duck—a great first-year beast, the origin of the famous question always asked but never answered: _what, exactly, is the function of a rubber duck?_

Today, the classroom was even more off-kilter than usual: dividing the room neatly in half was a great purple curtain. It hadn't been closed when they entered. The students hadn't even noticed it at first, drawn out of the way.

"All right, everybody," she'd smiled suspiciously. "I'm going to ask you, best as you can, to divide the room in two halves: those of you who believe that Romeo and Juliet were fools, go to one side. Everybody else to the other."

Once they'd divvied themselves up, Cuffe had flicked her wand and shut the curtain, separating the groups entirely. She was the only one who could travel between the sides, and a somewhat impressive _Muffliato_ seemed to soundproof the halves entirely.

"She's an impressive witch, you've got to admit," Sirius admitted with a smirk.

"Don't let your obsession with Cuffe distract you from the fact that she's insane." Marlene chose to examine her nails in favor of looking at him.

Lily glanced at her own nails; the new coat of purple varnish nearly matched the curtain. This was by no means an important discovery, but it made the situation a bit more tolerable all the same.

The uncertainty in Kerry's expression grew. She clearly wanted to be part of their group, this odd collection of Gryffindor girls and Marauders that always seemed to burn brighter than anything around them, but she had no idea how to get there.

"Don't talk about Matilda like that!" Sirius exclaimed in mock outrage. "The nerve of you!"

"You're really making sure the silencing charm doesn't go to waste, huh?" Lily asked.

"It's terrible to be wasteful, Lily," said Marlene.

"Shouldn't we, y'know," the Ravenclaw said uncertainly, "talk about the play?"

Sirius gave her a blank look. "Why in the world would we do that?"

Her eyes widened, and Lily heard Marlene cover her laughter with a cough. She picked at the last bit of purple polish on her thumb.

"Well, everybody else is," she pointed out, gesturing vaguely to the other kids on their half, who were speaking quietly. They were all Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, Lily observed. No seventh year Slytherins elected to take Muggle Studies this year.

"Come on, guys," Lily said, not wanting to see Kerry flounder anymore. "Let's talk. Y'know, before _Matilda_ comes over and yells at us?"

"What is there to say, really?" Sirius asked. "Romeo sees Juliet at a party right after that other girl, Rosie or whoever—"

"Rosaline—" Lily suspected that he knew the right name perfectly well.

"—and he decides that she's just _too_ fit, falls in love with her on the spot, and of course she's in love with him too because his eyes are just _too_ pretty and his hair falls in just the right way…"

"Typical third year antics," Marlene adds, and unlike Lily's interruption, this actually slows Sirius's tirade.

"Third years don't get married and kill themselves in the span of a week, though," Lily added quietly. She always found that worse than the initial love-at-first-sight situation.

"I've got to be honest, Lily," Kerry started, "I'm surprised that you're over here with the nay-sayers."

"You and everybody on the bloody planet," said Sirius. He was surprised, too.

Lily sort of wanted to scream, but she gave a small smile and a shrug instead. "The way Shakespeare sets everything up makes it seem like he's making fun of them. Or, if not that, he's constantly highlighting the flaws in their logic that they can't see. How quickly they fall in love, how they get married in a ceremony that's not even technically legal, how they act so impulsively that Juliet doesn't warn Romeo about her plan to fake her death, and then Romeo kills himself the second he thinks things have gone wrong. It's hard to see them as anything _but_ foolish."

"Oh," she said. "Yeah, good point. Good points, I guess."

Lily blushed. She hadn't meant to ramble.

"Remind me to never fall in love with you, Lily," Marlene mumbled. "You'd be such a bloody drag about it."

"You think they're stupid, too," she protested in a hushed tone, looking down and trying to find the Little Dipper on her right hand.

"Don't get me wrong, of course I do. Just not fervently enough to have a twenty-point argument against them."

She fell silent, finding herself without the energy to argue.

Wasn't the point of this to be surrounded by people who agreed with her?

.

"Is she alright?" Lily asked the moment she saw Marlene coming down the girl's dormitory stairs.

She nodded wearily, making her way to settle down on the couch next to Sirius. "She was out in a few minutes after she calmed down. Emmeline said she'd stay up there with her, just for peace of mind."

"That's…good," Lily said, trying to stop worry from inching its way into her expression. Around them, the boys shifted in their seats, presumably doing the same. Remus was noticeably absent. She glanced towards the window, though she already knew it would be too cloudy to catch sight of the moon.

"I don't know why she's been so much worse this month."

Peter gave an uncomfortable cough.

"It's been what, six months now?" Sirius asked.

"Not quite," Dorcas said. The seat next to hers was notably empty. "It'll be six months on the twenty-sixth."

The crackling of the fireplace seemed louder for a moment then. In the corner, the last lingering group of students—some fifth-year boys—picked up their things and retreated upstairs. Adam shook his head. "It's so fucked up."

"Is it bad," Marlene started hesitantly, waiting until the younger boys were out of sight to continue, "that the war didn't feel quite real to me until she was cursed?"

"Of course it isn't, Marlene," said Adam. "That's probably how it felt for a lot of you."

Dorcas nodded. "It was the same way for me, Marlie."

Lily wished she could've been as removed as they used to be. She tried not to feel jealous, or bitter, or anything else dark that crept its way up her throat. Adam met her eye.

_It's not their fault_, he seemed to say.

She swallowed, nodded, trying to push it all away. As her eyes moved away from Adam's she caught a glance of James; he looked about as unsettled as she felt. The expression was odd on his face, like it didn't quite fit his features.

"It has to be embarrassing," Peter said awkwardly. "This sounds bad, y'know, but it has to be embarrassing to break down like that in front of the whole common room."

"I doubt that _embarrassment_ was her main issue, Peter," Marlene rolled her eyes.

"How should we know?" Sirius asked. Marlene elbowed him in the side, prompting him to jump up in his seat. "Oi! Uncalled for, Price."

"You were being a prat, Black, if you didn't realise."

"That's a matter of opinion," he argued.

"Mary's been having panic attacks for half a year now, so I don't really give a damn about your _opinion_ on the matter, sorry."

The fire roared in the background. Sirius glanced at the window worriedly, but the moon was still obscured.

"So…what did you lot think of Muggle Studies today?" Marlene said after a moment too many passed; she did that sometimes, tried to act like she hadn't blown her lid a second before.

"Right," Dorcas said, tapping her thighs and standing from the couch. "That's my cue, I think."

Peter and Adam, the other two of the group who were not in the class, sheepishly stood alongside her. Lily sort of wished she could leave, too.

"G'night, Marlene." Adam nodded to her. "Lily, Sirius, James."

Marlene always got special attention from Adam, but she refused to acknowledge it.

"I thought it was an interesting idea today, keeping the disagreeing sides apart," James said, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes.

Sirius nodded. "It was nice to talk to sensible people without being bothered by the True Love Brigade."

"I _do_ like that name," James hummed. Lily could almost feel it in her chest.

"Me too, actually," Lily agreed. "It captures their essence very acutely."

"Our essence?" He asked curiously, raising an eyebrow.

James did that a lot. Lily tried not to pay attention to it.

"It's like you're on a crusade, shouting about the importance of love over everything or something like that."

"Is that right," James said, not quite asking. His eyes stayed on her, and Lily could pick out a familiar amusement behind his firelit glasses.

"Is it wrong?" Even as she challenged him she felt like she was drowning. Lily hated all the talk about the play—about love—but she didn't know how to avoid it. In the past couple of days, she'd seen herself falling into the background around it; every time she chose to speak up, it made her want to kick herself.

Maybe it wasn't just Muggle Studies that prompted this change in her behaviour; she tended to fall deeper inside of herself as the weather cooled. Usually the melancholy of fall was a nice contrast to her summer attitude, and it always faded in time for Christmas—Lily _loved_ Christmas—but this year, the world around her was darker. Her autumn haze was a little too heavy.

"Maybe not," he admitted with a smile, "but just wait until Cuffe takes down that curtain, Lily. I'll get you to see the light."

Her throat tightened a bit. She turned to the window again; the clouds were moving fast.

"Once the curtain comes down, you'll be back in the real world," said Marlene. "Then you won't be able to hide from logic behind your _Amortentia _and poor judgement, and you'll have to face the reality that they're just some stupid kids."

James's smile only grew. "Bit harsh, don't you think?"

"The world's harsh, Prongs," Sirius drawled, all kinds of melodrama in his tone.

"No shit, Padfoot."

Lily stood up suddenly. "I think we can save the discussion for class, yeah? I'm going to bed."

"Night." Marlene stretched out on the sofa as if she had no intentions of leaving any time soon.

"I'll go with you," James said, standing as well, running a hand through his hair. It stood straight up; Lily felt a curious urge to pat it back down. "Wouldn't be gentlemanly to let you walk alone, after all."

"Oh, definitely not. I wouldn't be able to stand the long trek to the heads dorm by myself."

Lily navigated through the various worn couches and beat-up tables, making her way to the back of the room, acting as if James wasn't just behind her. She had to search for a moment once she reached the wall, keeping her eyes open for a small golden mark that should've been about…

James touched his finger to a spot just left of where she'd been searching. "_Amabo te_," he whispered, so quietly that Lily could just barely hear it, let alone anybody nearby.

The mark expanded suddenly into the shape of a doorway, crimson with a golden handle. James turned the knob and held the door open for her, gesturing dramatically and generally making the whole thing into an event. She wanted to make a joke about it, but the doorway never stayed for long, so she settled for rolling her eyes instead.

After he followed her through the door, it shrunk back down, closing the hallway they now faced into a dead end. The walls inside were the same crimson as the door, with golden sconces holding up candles along the path. Lily was unsure why the head's dormitories needed to be at the end of what was a decently long hallway. Something to do with the layout of the tower, most likely, but that seemed stupidly reasonable for Hogwarts. If only she had a map.

"Bet you're still proud of that one," Lily said to fill the silence. She spoke softly, but her voice seemed to travel all the way down the hall.

"Please _is_ the magic word, you know," James grinned.

"Do you wake up every morning, stare in the mirror and think _Merlin, I'm clever_?"

"Yes, I do, and I highly recommend you try it sometime," he joked as he ambled along. Walking wasn't exactly difficult for Lily, but watching James made her feel as if she was trying too hard. "Does wonders for the ego."

"Explains a lot," she hummed, opting for the obvious jab. He didn't respond, and Lily grew concerned that the joke was too reminiscent of the way they used to talk to each other. Some days, it felt as if it'd been ages since she'd ever hated James—since he'd tormented he with his constant confessions of love. Other days, it felt as if he hadn't changed at all since fifth year.

"I didn't think you knew Latin. They don't teach it here."

"My father has a _very_ large library. You ever get so bored during the summer, you learn an entire dead language?"

"No. That's the beauty of television; you never have to do anything productive."

"That sounds kind of sad." James frowned. Lily didn't want to get into any discussions about muggle life, so she met his claim with silence.

"I know we'll have plenty of time to discuss this later, but I'm very confused, Lily."

She furrowed her brow. "About the television?"

"About how you could think that Romeo and Juliet is just about two stupid kids who made one too many mistakes."

She was caught off guard by his shift in his tone as well as the subject—enough so to keep her from being annoyed by the inquiry, which was getting old very fast. He'd been typically cavalier moments before, but now James was unnervingly solemn. "I don't know how anybody can read anything else from it," she said carefully. "They're careless. They think that what they're feeling is all that matters."

"Isn't it, though?" It felt like he was interrogating her. The hallway began to feel a bit too narrow. If he wanted to, Lily was sure he could've stretched out his arms and filled the entire space.

"No," she replied, shaking the errant thought from her head and furrowing her brow. "Of course it's not. There was so much violence and chaos all around them, inches from their faces, and all they could be bothered to think about was each other."

She wished she sounded less uncertain, because it really was a good point she was making, but the odd look in James's hazel eyes was making her flounder. That, and the proximity.

"Can you blame them?" His face was serious for a split second before cracking with a smile—one weaker than his usual fare. Lily didn't know how to answer. _Yes_, she wanted to say, because _obviously_ you could, but that didn't seem right.

Before she could come up with the words to say, they reached the twin doors at the end of their path.

"Sweet dreams," James said, running his hand through his hair once more as he disappeared into his room.

_He makes absolutely no sense_, Lily thought, but that was really nothing new.

.

James stood still for a moment, staring at nothing specific.

That wasn't to say that nothing in the room was worth looking at; the Head Dormitory was almost too ornate, like the prefect's baths, red and gold everywhere and furniture as nice as what he was used to back home. Unlike the common room, which was comfortably worn from years of Gryffindor antics, the room felt oddly untouched.

Gryffindor boys weren't often Heads, he guessed.

He walked over to an overstuffed velvet chair in the corner, picking up the _Daily Prophet_ he'd tossed there the day before.

**SEVEN AURORS DEAD IN TARGETED ATTACK.**

James had politely asked Adam if he could borrow his paper and politely forgotten to return it. He'd read it hurriedly, too quickly, waiting for and praying that a specific name wouldn't catch his eye.

His heart fell when it did, but only for a moment.

_When asked for her thoughts on the tragic incident, which has been confirmed as a Death Eater attack, head Auror Euphemia Potter claimed to be too busy to comment._

When he was a little kid, having an Auror as a mum was impossibly cool. Not as much lately.

Without his permission, his thoughts wandered to the subject of Lily Evans, as they frequently did. Tonight specifically, they stopped on the way her face looked when Marlene mentioned the war. She went ashen, though her eyes didn't betray anything on their own. Everything about her seemed to shrink in by a fraction. In the past month, she'd been doing that more and more often—closing down on herself, even though last year had been nearly as bad and she only ever raised her voice then.

Lily was terrified of the war, he knew, despite the fact that they'd never discussed it.

James cast another glance at the newspaper. The names of the dead and the name of his mother, inches apart.

He was terrified of the war, too.

.

News travelled fast around Hogwarts, but sometimes not fast enough. There was plenty to go around these days.

Sometimes, Lily felt that being Head Girl kept her separate from all the gossip the school had to offer. Not only because everybody knew who she was—_shh, stop talking, that's Lily Evans, she would give us _so_ many detentions if she heard_—but also because of her isolated dorm.

Sleeping in a room with four other girls had been weird to her as a first-year. Now, six years later, having a room to herself felt downright lonely. There had already been nights where she'd gone back to her old dorm, sharing a bed with Marlene so that she wouldn't feel so estranged.

Her train of thought had gone askew, she realised as she walked into the Great Hall for breakfast, wondering why everybody seemed more somber than usual. Scanning the Gryffindor table didn't lend her many clues at first:

James and Sirius were stuffing their faces; Remus was absent, and Lily knew he would be until around noon; Mary looked wan, but given her panic attack last night, that was to be expected; Adam was missing and Marlene was tearstained…

_Oh_, Lily thought. Something was, most likely, incredibly wrong.

She felt oddly guilty as she sat down next to Marlene. It was wrong for her to be normal while everybody else was so grim, she knew, but she didn't think it would be very sensitive of her to immediately start prying.

"Is everything alright?" She asked a moment later, cursing herself inwardly.

Marlene turned to look at her with red-rimmed eyes. "Adam's mum was murdered last night."

Lily's blood froze.

"It was by Death Eaters, apparently. Left their damn mark plastered all over his house." Her face was stoic but pinched, more strained than her typical resting expression. She was trying not to cry again. "Fucking unbelievable."

The words registered faintly in the back of Lily's mind. Adam McKinnon was a Muggleborn. His mum was a muggle. The Death Eaters were targeting muggles now.

Before she could process anymore—she knew that any further thinking would bring forth hysterics, and the Great Hall was not the place for that—Lily stood up and headed for the door. She felt oddly still.

"Lily?" Marlene asked.

"Are you alright, Lily?" Another voice, one of the boys, called.

Lily took a breath, thought about where she was, and turned to face the table. "I," she heard her voice waver and swallowed. "I'm…going, I think. To the bathroom. Okay."

Turning on her heel, she walked out of the hall with small, quick steps that set the morning conversation at an almost frantic tempo.

She needed to write her mum. She needed to write everybody, she needed to go home, she needed to make sure they were all okay. Was everybody okay?

Lily pushed through the door of the second floor's girl's bathroom, wishing it had been closer, and felt the first tears slide down her cheeks as it closed behind her. Her chest heaved, breathing too fast, but she couldn't bring herself to calm down.

She'd been ignoring it. Not really, but well enough to keep her from spending every minute on edge. Lily had just been pretending she didn't know what it meant.

She was a Muggleborn.

Her entire family was at risk.

"Fuck," she said under her breath, hitting a fist against a bathroom stall.

"Lily?" A voice asked. It wouldn't have surprised her—nobody went into this bathroom _not _expecting to be interrupted by Moaning Myrtle—but the voice was decidedly not that of an eleven-year-old girl.

"Adam?" Lily replied, wiping her eyes quickly as she turned to face him.

"Are…" His hair was disheveled, his eyes were red, and his cheeks were still wet; he rubbed a hand over his face and cleared his throat. "Are you alright, Lily?"

She wanted to laugh. She knew that was wrong, but still. Her tears felt cool against her skin. "Shouldn't I be asking you that?"

Adam shrugged, leaning against the sink behind him. Lily leaned against the stall facing him. The bathroom felt a bit dingy and grey, but beams of light from high-up windows made the space bright. One was caught right on Adam's cheek. "You _are_ crying in a bathroom."

"So are you, yeah?"

He tried for a laugh. It didn't make it past his throat, much less his lips. "Fair point."

Lily felt something heavy and draining inside her heart, something that made her shrink around it. She had to will herself not to slide down against the stall and onto the floor; Hogwarts's bathrooms were not renowned for their cleanliness. "I am…_so_ sorry about your mum, Adam."

"Me too."

"I guess I'm just…" Her first instinct was to explain herself. "I'm crying because it's—it feels more real now?"

She was sure that her sentence fragments made no sense, but of course Adam nodded. Of course he understood.

Adam nodded. "Last night, when Marlene was talking about Mary's attack being the thing that made the war _real_ to her, I thought it was one of the most ignorant bloody things I'd ever heard. And I love—" His voice caught, but he kept going, "I love Marlene, but it felt so sheltered. Like such a Pureblood thing to say. I thought it was _always_ real to me, y'know, because the war is _about _me." He gave Lily a meaningful look. "Us."

_Mudbloods._

_Muggleborns._

She nodded, swallowing hard, wishing the pressure would leave her chest.

"But now my mum is…she's dead, and I don't even remember the last thing I said to her—I think it was _Love you, see you in December,_ but I don't fucking _know_—and I don't even know where I put the letter she sent me that I hadn't gotten around to replying to yet, and—"

He was crying as he spoke, silent but desperate tears accompanying his distress, and Lily tried to focus on the way his chest heaved instead of his crumpled-up face. She wasn't successful. It was beautiful, the way the light made his cheeks shine.

"—and now it feels like nothing has been real until this _exact_ goddamned moment."

Lily crossed the short distance to the sinks and hugged him. It could've been uncomfortable—they were never very close—but there was no room for that in everything else they felt.

Mudbloods.

Muggleborns.

Neither of them could stop crying for a while. At some point, they stopped minding the grime and sat down on the bathroom floor, both feeling the wrong kind of empty and both unwilling to go to class.

"My dad is dead," Lily said after a long silence, feeling her throat tighten almost instantly. She tried to remember another time she'd said that sentence out loud. None came to mind.

Adam's eyebrows raised involuntarily, but he said nothing; his blue eyes were clear enough to keep her talking.

"Not because of Death Eaters, or Voldemort, or Cornish bloody Pixies." Lily had no idea why she was making a joke. Adam just looked at her, waiting for more. "It was cancer. When I was fourteen. Not magical at all."

She was crying again. His eyes didn't change.

"Do you think wizards care about cancer? Or even know what it is?" She asked absently, not bothering to wipe her face anymore. "Do you think they have the cure, and just keep forgetting to let the muggles know?"

Adam lowered his gaze and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Lily."

Lily dropped her head, too, and cursed the tears that wouldn't stop falling.

.

"Alright," Professor Cuffe announced. The class lacked its normal chaos and clamor, so she didn't need to raise her voice as she usually did when class began. "Yesterday, you all were isolated. In your own worlds, per se.

"Today, we'll be talking one-on-one; a person from each side, just to see where that takes discussion."

Despite the affected air of the class, everybody instinctively searched around, hoping to lock eyes with a prospective partner. The witch gave a friendly sort of sigh. "Go on then, sort yourselves out."

Lily ended up paired with Remus, who had just returned from the Hospital Wing. Or his mother's house. Same difference.

He looked a bit pale, a bit worn-down, but that was far from out-of-place with the rest of the day. Staring at him, Lily tried to imagine what he looked like as a wolf. His face elongating, fingernails shifting into claws, his back arching as the vertebrae stretched until they almost snapped.

It didn't translate at all. The only Remus she could think of was the one in front of her now—messy, blond, wearing a fantastically ugly sweater—even though she'd known about his "furry little secret" for more than a year now.

"It has not been a good morning," she said in a lowered tone.

"For once it's not just me." He was joking, but nothing about his expression or inflection would've given that away.

Lily drummed her fingers against her desk. Her eggplant nails were starting to chip; she'd picked a few clean in the bathroom.

"So," he started. "Romeo and Juliet. You think they're moronic."

Instantly she felt the need to protest, but there was nothing there to deny. "Guess so."

"You've really thrown the class off with that one."

"I'm aware," she replied evenly.

"I can see why you'd think that, though."

Lily perked up somewhat at this. "I mean, it's not as if I'm some heartless bastard. They're kids; the play is about a series of ill-informed, rash decisions that end up taking them to their graves."

_I'm just very confused…about how you could think that Romeo and Juliet is just about two stupid kids who made one too many mistakes._

Remus shrugged. "I guess it does seem that way, doesn't it?"

She wasn't sure why he was dragging this out so much, when clearly he had a point to make. "And yet you're a member of the True Love Brigade."

He laughed tiredly. "Clever. I just think that it wasn't their fault."

"They did it to themselves," Lily argued automatically. "I don't understand how you lot can just say _it was the world's fault_ and they get away scot-free."

"I don't know, Lily," Remus said, giving off the impression that he knew very well. "Imagine you're thirteen, and you've just had your first kiss, and you're desperately in love. Puppy love, you know, a crush, but it's not like you can tell the difference."

Her first kiss had been with Terrence Daly in fourth year. She was a late bloomer.

"So you're head over heels for this boy, and when your mum finds out tells you that you can't be with him because she hates his mum. It has nothing to do with you, yeah? But when you keep seeing him, like plenty of thirteen-year-olds would, people start dying. Your parents start talking about marrying you off."

"I get what you're saying," she said, mostly because she did understand but also because she knew this metaphor could carry on for a while.

"I'm saying the same thing as you, really." Something about the literary talk was giving Remus back some life: color in his cheeks and light in his eyes. Lily was glad for it.

.

"She was thirteen, Prongs."

"She was in _love_, Padfoot."

Sirius laughed. "I'll give you ten galleons if you can find a third-year bird who doesn't think they're in love."

"It doesn't matter if she _thinks_ she's in love or if she _is_," James said, only partially aware of how irrational he might sound. "She didn't deserve to die because of it."

"Nobody ever _deserves _to die—" His face darkened. His grey eyes, silver in good light, were stony. "I take that back, actually. Either way, it doesn't mean shite. People die anyways.

"Maybe it _was_ a bit of a rough deal, the way everything turned out for them, but they decided to keep meeting when their parents said no. They decided to get married. Romeo decided to off himself when he saw Juliet's dead body, and she decided to do the same thing when she saw his. It's not fair—neither of them _deserved_ it." Sirius shrugged callously. "But it is their own fault."

He frowned. "You've gotten a lot more negative lately, mate."

"And somehow, you've only grown more bushy-tailed and hopeful," Sirius shot back with an unconvincing smile. "It's impressive, really."

"I don't understand why everybody thinks we need to change the way we act because of this mess," James protested, no longer complaining about his friend, instead setting his sights the whole of Hogwarts's student body. "Just because everything is getting nasty doesn't mean we have to let it beat us down."

Sirius's eyes shone with something unkind. "Bloody inspiring, Prongs."

"When's the last time you talked to Regulus?"

"Good question. When's the last time you wrote to your mum?"

It was a low blow, and they both knew it. Somehow it cleared the air between them.

"I think I know how to turn our frowns upside down, Padfoot," James said, letting a smirk grow slowly, hesitantly on his face, feeling relief as Sirius grew one to match.

"Do go on."

.

"Mulciber really didn't need to get so worked up about it; he looked very lovely in red and gold, didn't he?" Sirius asked with a laugh as he tumbled through the portrait-hole. The common room was empty—unless you counted the trio of fourth-year girls eating around their books, which of course he didn't. The majority of the Gryffindor crowd was still in the Great Hall, trying to finish their lunch in spite of the havoc that had been freshly wreaked.

"Positively radiant! Not quite as breathtaking as Snivellus, but who could possibly compare?" James followed behind him, tripping and just barely catching himself before he fell on his face. This got the girls to look up, but only out of instinct; they were largely desensitised to the pair by this point.

"Certainly not you, Prongsy," his friend continued with a chuckle. James rolled his eyes.

"Don't ruin the moment."

The post-prank light in Sirius's eyes dimmed. "My fault, mate. Let's just focus on the way Avery's eyes nearly popped out of his head when—"

"Are you two _kidding _me?" Marlene interrupted, storming through the door.

"Well, that is sort of how jokes work, Price, if—"

"What in Merlin's sodding toenail clippings made you think that was even _close _to a good idea?"

"It was just a prank, Marlene," James said, trying to sound reasonable.

"Oh, was it? I hadn't bloody noticed." Her face was bright red. This was enough out of the ordinary that the fourth-year girls couldn't bring themselves to look away. Folding her arms, Marlene shook her head and turned away from the boys for a moment; her eyes were dangerously bright when she faced them again.

"Adam's mum died last night. Last _night_. Not even twenty-four hours ago, and you think this is the appropriate time for a fucking _prank_?"

Their smiles slipped off their faces in an instant.

"That's what I thought." Pushing past them, the witch stormed up to her dormitory, each step upstairs pointedly loud.

"Blimey," Sirius said, eyebrows high on his face. "She's feeling face-bitey today."

"Her boyfriend's mum was murdered last night, Pads."

"McKinnon and Price are _not_ shagging, Prongs, you know that."

"Merlin, he's got to get on that."

The girls on the couch turned back to their books. There was no more excitement to be found here.

.

Lily didn't want to be alone that night.

It wasn't as if she was scared Death Eaters would burst into her dorm and finish her off right there; she simply didn't want to stare at her dorm ceiling all evening, thinking herself sick. The image of Severus—face dyed a brilliant red, his hair shining gold—passed through her mind, and she tried to shake the picture away.

It would've been easier if she could be by the fire, or the Great Lake, or the Astronomy Tower, but none of those options panned out tonight. Too loud. Too late. Too cold.

She thought of the anger in his eyes, the frustration, the embarrassment.

The clouds tonight were slow-moving, from what she could see out her window.

In the glass she saw her old friend at thirteen, his hair hexed to drip some odd black slime. In that moment his eyes had been the same, just as ashamed and angry and helpless. The same way they'd looked when the Levicorpus caught him, when his mouth opened, when such awful words came out.

"_I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!"_

Lily remembered that look, those words, too often.

There was no reason for her to feel bad for him.

No reason at all.

Lily stared up at her ceiling and wished her feelings would make more sense.

.

Hogsmeade was chilly that day, drizzly and grey, but despite the unfortunate weather the village was teeming with students.

Morale was low, generally speaking; everybody was dying for a change.

That's what Lily thought, at least. Instead of spending the afternoon with her friends, she was opting to wander the rainy streets, thinking herself in circles. The trees had all turned their bright shades of red and orange—matching her hair, according to about a dozen passerby at her count—but the grey sky dimmed their vibrancy.

Fall was beautiful, but it always made her sad.

For the past ten minutes she'd debated going into Madam Puddifoot's. A warm cup of tea would have been lovely, just what the weather called for, but she didn't much care for the cloying pink atmosphere and all of the sickly-sweet couples that were bound to be inside. It was the unspoken rule: Puddifoot's was for dates. Going alone would be awkward to explain.

Lily had just made up her mind to go—after all, she was a grown witch who wanted some tea, it was a tea shop. who cared if she went in alone?—when she heard her name across the street.

"Lily!"

She turned to face the voice—and upon finding James as its source, she decided the best course of action was to _get out of there_.

"Lily! Evans!" He was nothing if not persistent; she should've known that by now. "You, with the face! I know you saw me!"

Unwilling to let the scene carry on, Lily whipped around to face him. "What do you want, James?"

The rain was beginning to make her shiver. She just wanted a cup of sodding tea.

"I wanted to apologise."

This stopped her fuming. It certainly wasn't what she expected him to say. Lily wracked her brain, trying to think of anything he'd done to her in the past couple of days, and came up blank. She'd been avoiding almost everybody since the prank. _Oh_.

"You don't need to apologise to me, James."

"Yeah," he said awkwardly, ruffling up his hair. Beads of water shook off with the motion and one landed squarely on Lily's cheek. "Only, I think I _do_, because you haven't said a word to me in two days."

"I've been busy." Even she could hear the tension in her voice. She thought her aversion had been subtler than that. _Apparently not_.

"We're in all the same classes, Lily, and we're both heads; you've been no more busy than me. Also, I would like to restate that you have somehow not said a _word_ to me in the past two days, despite the fact that we are not only in all of the same classes, the same house, and Head bloody Boy and Girl."

Lily laughed without thinking, and he cracked a less uncomfortable grin.

It unsettled her to see him so easy. "I'm going to get tea."

She was already walking away when she heard him behind her.

"Tea sounds ace right now."

"Wasn't an invitation," Lily sighed. He caught up to her easily, and when they were next to each other again, she saw his glasses were covered in raindrops. As drenched as he was, James sort of reminded her of a wet dog. "But I suppose you can tag along."

"Does this mean I'm forgiven?"

"I never even asked for an apology."

"Doesn't mean I didn't need to give one," James argued as they entered the shop. Her spirits lifted at the scent of a dozen different brewing teas. Even the overload of pink felt more comforting than cloying today.

"Could you please explain why you seem to _want_ me to be mad at you?" She asked, sitting down at the only empty table in the room.

He shook his head. A few more water droplets flew from his hair; somehow, it managed to look even darker wet. "You've got it all wrong. It's not that I _want_ you to be mad at me. You _are_ mad at me, very obviously, but you've got it shoved so deep in one of those dark corners of yours that you won't even accept this perfectly good apology."

A waitress approached, her black hair in a bouncy ponytail and bright pink lipstick coating her smile. It matched her apron exactly, and Lily let herself be distracted by the implications for a moment; was every employee required to wear it, or did she do this on her own?

"One white tea, please." She smiled politely.

"And for you, love?" The waitress asked James.

Lily took a moment to scan the shop. None of the other waitresses were wearing lipstick at all.

"An earl grey would be lovely, thanks," he grinned, turning on his "for strangers" charm in an instant. Lily didn't know if she should laugh or roll her eyes. Instead, she glanced at her hands; she'd painted her nails orange last night, and her ring finger had smudged while she slept.

"So?"

"What do you want from me, James?" Glancing at the other patrons, Lily reminded herself to keep her tone low, no matter how badly her confusion made her want to raise it. "You're apologising, and I'm saying you don't need to, so I don't understand the sodding problem."

James frowned a bit, nodding. "You're _really_ mad, then, aren't you?"

Lily imagined steam spouting out her ears. "What is your problem, James?" She did her best to stay even-tempered. "How is it possible you can do something so insensitive—the bloody _day_ Adam's mum dies—and think nothing of it, but insist on apologising for it to somebody who doesn't care?"

She hated the satisfaction that crept into his expression, however sheepish it may have been. "_Really_ mad."

Her cheeks flushed. "It was a prat thing to do."

"I know."

"And an _awful_ time to do it."

"I know."

"We have _enough_ problems with house relations right now, James, and attacking Se—the Slytherins—definitely doesn't _help_ that—"

"I know, Lily. Sirius and I have both heard plenty about it already. We've talked it out with Adam and Marlene and Mary, even the Fat sodding Lady at this point. It was stupid."

"Oh." Hearing this made her feel better. At least he'd already apologised to the people who deserved it.

"Yep," James nodded, lowering his eyes to the lacy tablecloth. "All sorted."

"Why did you do it?" Lily surprised herself with her own question; from the look in James's eyes, she wasn't the only one.

"One white tea and one earl grey," their waitress announced as she approached table, placing their cups in front of them. The pair jumped and turned to face her like they'd been caught doing something bad.

"Thank you!" She said, a bit too eagerly.

"These look _incredible_, thanks," James said at the same time.

The waitress didn't particularly care. She was quite used to awkward couples in the shop.

Lily wanted to say something more, but she knew he hadn't forgotten her question; it sat heavy in the air. Lifting her tea cup from her saucer, she intended to take a sip, but the steam itself was hot enough to scare her away from the drink.

James slid down some in his seat, but because of their height difference, the movement just put him directly in Lily's gaze. His hair looked nice wet, she decided. "It seemed like a good idea."

"Your standards for a 'good' idea vary greatly from mine, James. Could you elaborate?"

He shrugged like a scolded child. "I dunno, pranks used to help. Made everybody laugh."

"Somebody died."

"I know that," James said with barely-contained frustration. "I was just trying to lighten the stupid mood."

Very suddenly, and without having fully realised that she was upset with him in the first place, Lily forgave him.

"Things aren't like they were in third year," she started gently. "There's a war happening. We have to…live around it, I guess."

James met her eye, and Lily felt like she'd been caught in headlights. His expression was unsettling on him—guilt, anger, and confusion all rested on top of frustration, something she'd never be able to put into words but something she understood. It was wrong very simply because it was _James_; any expression save a smile was wrong on his face.

"So we aren't allowed to be happy anymore, then?"

She didn't want to be the one to tell him that the answer was yes—at least partially.

"It means…" Lily bit her lip, trying to find the words, "we have to adjust, is all."

James nodded, slowly, like he didn't believe her. She could see tension in the way he sat, but he lifted up in his chair, ready to move on. "Could you pass me the sugar?"

_The_ _world is ending_, she couldn't help but think as she handed him the pastel container. _There's not much we can do about it_.

"James?" Lily didn't meet his eyes anymore. She'd hit her limit, she supposed.

"Yeah?"

"I forgive you, by the way."

"Ace." He grinned, and Lily let herself believe that it meant everything was okay.

.

That night, patrolling the halls, Lily found herself thinking about James Potter. If she'd been more aware of it, she would have changed course on her train of thought, but it was too late for those levels of self-control. Her mind had been very undisciplined lately, leading her to everything she wanted to ignore.

Her footsteps echoed, sounds of stone floors bouncing off stone walls.

She was used to his persistence, but something about it was different in Hogsmeade this afternoon.

He seemed genuinely upset. Repentant, she thought. There was something wrong with the light in his eyes.

"_So we aren't allowed to be happy anymore, then?"_

Lily's first thought was _yes_, and she believed that—to a degree. They couldn't be happy in the same way. She couldn't let her thoughts wander without thinking of the war. She couldn't be friends with people she used to love. She couldn't laugh, couldn't smile, couldn't breathe without being reminded that the world that'd adopted her was fighting itself to death.

If she had known all of this would happen when she was eleven, when she received her first letter, would she have gone to Hogwarts at all?

A loud crash sounded a few metres down the hall, and it echoed and echoed.

Her questions would have to wait; they often went unanswered these days.

"_Lumos_," she whispered, moving wand-first towards the noise.

"Oh, Merlin's saggy left—" A voice, a male voice, stopped itself short, and the boy turned to face her. He might've been a sixth year; he looked familiar, but Lily couldn't put a name on him. His tie was green and silver. A suit of armour lay in pieces around his feet, the helmet in his hands.

"Oi!" She called out. "What are you doing out this late?"

"Sod off, would you?" The boy said distractedly, whirling back around to puzzle with the collapsed armour.

Lily's jaw dropped with indignation. "Excuse me?"

"I don't need some muddy-blooded bitch nosing around in my business." The words rolled off his tongue like they nothing; the delivery was awfully familiar. Dropping the helmet, he took a step towards her, and Lily tightened her grip on her wand. "You're the skirt Severus used to be obsessed with, yeah?"

"I don't know what on _earth_ makes you think you can talk to me like this—"

"For Merlin's sake," he interrupted, shaking his head, "You're _exactly_ what's wrong with the ruddy world. Fucking Mudbloods running around like they own the damn place."

The words hit her straight in the chest.

"Wouldn't know from looking at you, though." He kept walking closer, and Lily was on high alert. "I can see what Severus was talking about, if I'm being honest. If it weren't for your blood…"

Lily was tired of hearing the bile coming from the boy's mouth. She could smell it on his breath. "Shut up."

The light from her wand caught his hand, and she saw it moving towards his pocket. "You don't _talk to me_ like that, you—"

The witch brought her knee up swiftly—god, he had been _close_—and he was down in an instant.

"_Petrificus Totalus_," she mumbled, wand level, for good measure. The surprise and pain were frozen on his face, and Lily couldn't help but laugh a little at the sight. In her seven years at Hogwarts, she'd learned quickly that there was one sort of 'wandless' magic that wizards never anticipated.

Lily bent down to take his wand, "_Shut. Up_."

He grunted angrily in protest.

"You were out past curfew, and about to attempt to attack the Head Girl," she said simply, the tremble mostly undetectable in her voice. "Filch will hold your wand until the morning; you can retrieve it from him. I'll come back to un-petrify you once I've turned it in."

Lily's hands shook as she walked away. It might've been fear, from so narrowly missing whatever curse the boy would've thrown at her; it might've been rage, from the words he had said; it might've been adrenaline, from a fight she didn't expect.

Whatever it was, Lily walked down the halls alone, tremors running through her heart, her anxious footsteps echoing against unyielding stone.

.

Lily looked shaken when she returned to the common room, a few minutes later than usual. Her face was a bit pale, hair a bit disheveled, eyes a bit wild. The firelight was warm and drowsy, but with her in its path it turned violent.

Nobody else acknowledged this as she sat down, though, so James stayed quiet.

"I'm ready for this ruddy week to end," she said tiredly. All her the stressful energy seemed to leave her in a flood.

"I second that," Mary said, the same exhaustion in her voice.

The pair had grown more similar lately. It made sense, he supposed, with them being the only Muggleborn girls, but he didn't like the thought. James didn't want to see Lily beaten down.

"This year has been a fucking drag so far," Sirius added from where he sat. There was empty space on the couch, but his legs took up most of Remus's lap instead.

"You think this is how Romeo and Juliet felt?" Marlene asked drily. Lily looked at her, bewildered.

"What?"

"Two households, both alike in dignity," she started, "In fair Hogwarts, where we lay our scene."

Everybody in the room groaned.

"Can we not talk about class right now, Marlene?" James pleaded.

"Fuck off, I'm onto something." Marlene rolled her eyes, undisturbed by her friend's protest. In the corner of his eye, he thought Lily grew paler—a trick of the light. "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."

"Well done, Marlene," Remus said, rubbing his eyes. "This is definitely _exactly_ how Romeo and Juliet felt. Montague and Capulet, Gryffindor and Slytherin, what's the difference?"

"You're definitely gonna get an O in Muggle Studies, Price."

"Too bad it isn't a NEWT," she muttered.

Lily's jaw dropped in mock outrage. "Bugger off, will you? I said it _once_."

"You've been saying it since the end of sixth year, Lily," Remus said, recoiling as she leveled her stare on him. "Merlin, you don't have to look so mad. I'm only telling the truth."

She looked as if she wanted to argue but couldn't find the words. It made James smile.

"There's a significant problem with your theory, Price," Sirius said, dragging them back on subject, saving the boy below him from the words Lily hadn't yet pieced together.

"I think you'll find that to be bull," Marlene replied smoothly, "because I am absolutely, unceasingly right, and always will be, Black."

"You're perfect, babe, but I digress." He shook his head, allowing for a dramatic pause. "It's not as if there are any star-crossed lovers hidden among us."

The room fell silent, and the crackling fire couldn't do enough to fill the space. James looked at Lily instinctively. Her eyes were already on him, he noticed with a start, but they were gone before he could process.

Was she thinking the same thing he was?

Or was she thinking about a Slytherin who she swore she hated?

Maybe she wasn't thinking about anything of the sort. Maybe James was reading far too much into it; he tended to do that with her. Look for signs that weren't there. Spin every glance, every smile, into an undeserved hope.

"Bugger, you're right," Marlene said after a moment. She didn't sound much too convinced.

Nobody replied.

"You know what'd be a trip?" Mary spoke up quietly. "If we all dressed up as the characters for Halloween."

For a second, nobody could think of an answer, but she didn't seem very worried—which was quite unlike her lately, James thought and promptly regretted thinking.

"That'd be cool," Lily mused.

"Didn't all the blokes wear tights back then?" James asked, hoping for some laughs.

"Well, I'm sold," Sirius laughed.

"I could be the Nurse," Mary continued, emboldened by the support of the group. She'd clearly thought about it before tonight. "Sirius could be Mercutio, Remus could be Benvolio…"

She turned to give James a look. "You and Lily could be Romeo and Juliet!"

He coughed uncomfortably, surprised. "Sorry, what?"

"Why would we…" Lily shook her head, eyebrows high, her blush visible even in the dim light. "That doesn't really make sense, Mary."

She was just as flustered as he was, he realised as she turned to stare at the fire.

Lily did that a lot. James always wondered what she saw in the flames.

"I thought it'd be funny," the witch said, furrowing her brow. "Y'know, since James used to be all obsessed with you and everything. Plus, who else would it be?"

"Remus and Sirius," Marlene suggested wryly. There was a smirk on her lips that she was doing a very poor job of concealing.

"I'm not wearing a dress," Remus argued, flipping her the bird.

"Don't be daft, Moony," James laughed. "Sirius is obviously Juliet."

"Sirius is Mercutio!" Mary objected.

"Sirius is Mercutio," he agreed from Remus's lap.

James groaned. "Please don't refer to yourself in the third person, Pads. It's giving me fifth year flashbacks."

This spurred some laughter from the group. "I thought it was cool," he mumbled under the commotion, embarrassed for a rare instant.

"It's alright, Padfoot." Remus gave him what was supposed to be a comforting squeeze on the shoulder, but it was marred by laughter he couldn't quite hold in.

"See?" Mary interrupted. "It's already fun, and we aren't even dressed up. We should do it."

Everybody agreed—with varying degrees of reluctance—as the last giggles died out. They hadn't laughed together like that in what felt like ages.

"Marlene, can I borrow a pair of your tights?" Sirius asked.

"Not a chance in hell, Black."

Back in his room, James spent far too much of the night thinking about Lily.

And where he was going to find a pair of bloody tights.

**you know when you're filtering through marauders fic and you can't find a representation of James and Lily that you think is right? so you just have to go out of your way to write your own story? that's this for me.**

**(this is also no shade at other marauders writers; i love a lot of things out there, i just want more out there that i like. sometimes the only way to find a story you like is to write it yourself.)**

**this has been on ao3 for a minute but I figured there's no harm in putting it on here, too. there's two more chapters up over there right now.**


	2. part two

Lily _really_ didn't want her thoughts to wander, but it always seemed to happen when she painted her nails. Crimson tonight; though she loved the colour, she found herself avoiding it simply because of all the Gryffindor comments it spurred.

For a while—especially in the beginning—Lily hated being associated with her house. She insisted that it didn't matter. The perception of people based on their houses was bizarre, exaggerated, unfair, and she would harp on it endlessly, even once people stopped listening. People from Slytherin could be good. People from Gryffindor could be complete, utter prats.

At seventeen, Lily still agreed with some of the points her younger self made. It was mostly her examples that'd spoiled with time.

_Filthy little Mudblood._

Her wand hand twitched and she smudged her pinky nail. Swearing to herself, Lily wiped the polish from her skin, trying to avoid the gory imagery—violent ends—the crimson brought to her mind.

Her other example hadn't soured, if that was any consolation. It didn't feel like much of one.

Their situation had improved, so much that it still surprised her sometimes. Lily could stand to be in the same room as him now; they could have a conversation. They could have tea at Madam bloody Puddifoot's. To her younger self, it would've been impossible to believe.

Beneath their new friendliness, though, Lily had a remarkably poor understanding of where she stood with James Potter.

He was an arse, absolutely, but lately he'd become more than that. Or, if not that, then there was some other part of him that'd had avoided her notice until now. The latter was a concept she'd rather ignore.

Lily wished she hadn't noticed; she wished things could stay as simple as they'd always managed to be.

Quickly, catching her off guard, her body remembered the anxiety it felt earlier that night.

_Running around like they own the damn place._

Screwing on the cap to her blood-red varnish with shaking hands, Lily tried to calm herself down. It may have been the most unsafe she'd ever felt within Hogwarts's walls.

How dearly she missed simplicity.

.

Grey skies always made everything feel colder, she thought with a shiver. The Great Lake was always murky and foreboding—perhaps an image borne entirely of its reputation for giant squids and sharp-toothed mermaids—but the green hue it took on during the warm months was at least more inviting than the nearly-frozen black.

"But do you think she fancies him?" The other nearly-frozen Black asked.

Marlene let out a puff of smoke, shaking her head. They'd been on the topic the entire walk to the Lake, and though the gossip was doing some good in distracting her, it was getting old fast.

"No fucking clue, if I'm honest."

Sirius tapped the ash from his cigarette. "I'm talking your ear off."

"No, keep talking."

Marlene and Sirius started smoking in fifth year, and although their friendship was not of the kindest, warmest sort, they'd always taken their breaks together. In her opinion, they did it just to listen to the sounds of their own voices without sounding like complete nutters; they very rarely had any significant conversation.

The wind picked up, and she wrapped her free arm around herself to fight off the chill.

Sirius stared off into the distance, somewhere past the lake, and in his dramatic stance his grey eyes blended seamlessly with the sky. Marlene had a sneaking suspicion he was doing it to look pensive and deep.

"Well, I think James fooled himself into thinking he's over her—again, that _beautifully_ daft arse—but he does that every other day now, so it's not saying much. Lately it seems…like she's more okay with him, I guess."

"Being able to stand his presence doesn't mean she's got the hots for him, sorry to say."

"So she _doesn't_ fancy him, then?" Sirius asked, breaking his gaze to look at the blonde beside him.

She rolled her eyes. "How should I know?"

"I dunno," he said. "Don't girls do that? Just talk about boys in a circle every night? Who's _so _fit, who's got the dreamiest eyes, who's got the tightest ar—"

"Lily doesn't talk about herself." Marlene frowned, looking at him like it should have been obvious.

Maybe in first, second year, Lily had been just as open as the rest of them.

None of the Gryffindor girls in their year came from big families, so in the beginning every night was like a slumber party. They talked about professors, fashion, boy bands—anything they could think of, but about as deep as a typical smoke break conversation. Marlene knew all about Lily's cat Agnes, and her favorite flavor of Bertie Bott's—_grass_, strangely enough—and how dearly she wished she'd been blonde.

Marlene found out that Lily's father was dead last night. Adam told her.

He'd passed away three years ago.

"No?" Sirius looked rather surprised, even beyond his usual theatrics.

"What do _you_ know about her?"

He furrowed his brow, taking a drag instead of talking; she never saw him quieter than when he was smoking—another benefit to the activity. "Not a damn thing, actually."

Marlene nodded smugly. "She's a goddamned vault."

"Now, that's—" he started with a bewildered grin, "that's a damn trip. How is it that Lily Evans—starry-eyed-dream-girl Evans—is…"

"A bloody enigma?" She finished for him. "We've been trying to figure out that one for years now, mate. Welcome to the team."

"She doesn't _seem_ like the fucking mysterious type," he laughed, pushing the messy black hair out of his face. The wind swept it directly back into his mouth before he could say another word.

"That's the mental part!" Marlene laughed along with him—in part because she knew how much hair product must've made its way into Sirius's mouth. He quickly took another drag, but she knew it wouldn't get rid of the taste the way he hoped.

"Merlin, he can really pick 'em."

Their brightly burning cigarettes were barely noticeable, the smoke blending into the fog, the ashes invisible in the monotone landscape. From a distance, their laughter was impossible to pick out; they looked almost to be a pair in mourning.

Simply a side-effect of their grim surroundings.

.

"Would Juliet wear nail varnish?" Mary asked idly as she charmed Lily's hair, concentration clear in her wide blue eyes.

Lily glanced at her chipped polish defensively. "Would the Nurse wear lipstick?"

"Why wouldn't she?"

"Did bubblegum pink lipstick even exist in the sixteenth century?"

The other girl frowned. "Fair point. Perhaps not one to make while I'm performing complex magic on your hair, but fair nonetheless."

Both girls laughed, prompting a mocking groan from Marlene.

"This is so childish," she laughed from her bed. Her Lady Capulet costume, a dark blue gown, was rather simple, but it was a miracle she'd agreed to dress up at all.

Halloween had always been Lily's favorite holiday. Fancy-dress parties were the best part of being a kid, as far as she was concerned. She'd dressed as princesses, as faeries, as witches; every costume she put on felt like a transformation.

She didn't know how to feel about transforming into Juliet.

Her lips and cheeks were reddened, and a few strands of her hair had been charmed into a delicate crown of braids. Her dress—simple and white—gave her the young, innocent image that defined the character.

Lily looked into the mirror and tried to imagine herself falling in love; she tried to imagine herself dying for love.

"You look twelve," Marlene said, walking over to the pair. Mary rolled her eyes.

"You look lovely, Lily."

"It wasn't an insult!" She objected. "Isn't she supposed to look twelve?"

"Thirteen, actually," Mary corrected with a giggle. The promise of the party helped to brighten her mood all week, and tonight she was so excited it bordered on effervescence.

"Dead, actually. You lot ready to go downstairs?" Marlene asked, clearly trying to avoid the scolding her joke would've earned.

Lily frowned. She looked into the mirror and saw Juliet.

"Yep," she smiled, turning from her reflection as fast as she could.

The music from the common room hit them the instant they opened the door. Though it was blasting loud enough to make her ears ache a bit, the song itself was slow and dreamy.

"Merlin, are they really playing bloody Cauldron Kids?" Mary asked. "What a mood killer."

"The night is young, dear Mary," Marlene smiled. "I'm sure you can snog the deejay into playing something better."

Mary quirked a brow, but her silence was enough to make the three burst into laughter. If one good thing was going to come out of the night, Lily thought, it was the weight it seemed to lift off her friend's shoulders.

"Well, look at that!" Sirius called out. "It's the ladies of the night!"

"Ladies of the _hour_, dimwit! We aren't bloody prostitutes."

He threw up his arms—Lily noticed the bottle in his left hand—and pointed at Marlene. "Couldn't care less, Price!"

Grinning, Marlene hurried down the rest of the stairs to enter the thick of the party.

"D'you ever think there's something between them?" Mary asked.

She couldn't stifle her laugh. "Oh, God no, that'd be awful."

"Can you imagine?" She pressed. "I bet they'd only insult each other more."

"They'd snog and argue on a non-stop loop."

"Who's snogging?" Emmeline asked. In the spirit of the holiday, everybody was dressed up, not just the Muggle Studies group; she looked like some odd bird. It was unclear if her feathers were glued on or if some dicey transfiguration had taken place.

"Marlene and Sirius," Mary answered gleefully.

"Merlin!"

"I know, right?"

Lily took the opportunity to walk deeper into the crowd. Younger students usually shied away from her, but they probably figured the Head Girl wouldn't dress in full costume to bust the party—or they were already too drunk to care. Either way, it was nice to blend in for once.

There was a table of drinks in the corner, and she made her way towards it. Lily didn't make a habit of drinking, but something about the energy of the night made her want a bottle—if only for something to do with her hands.

"Didn't peg you as a drunk."

Lily turned, ready to lay into whichever fifth year had decided to criticise her, only to find Remus standing behind her in a tunic and a hat that wasn't quite a beret. "Ah, Benvolio! Dashing as always."

"Juliet," he nodded in turn, "you almost look legal tonight!"

"I _am_ legal, thanks," she said as she grabbed an untouched bottle of elderflower wine, for the sake of any underage witnesses in the vicinity.

Remus raised his eyebrows. "The whole bottle, though?"

"I won't drink it all," she said, uncorking the bottle with her wand. "There aren't any wine glasses. I don't have anything else to drink it from."

He shook his head. "Who brought a bottle of wine?"

"Probably some third-year who was too afraid to drink it after they nicked it from their parents."

"Fuck, you're right, there's children here." Remus looked around at the younger students filling the common room, a funny glint of concern in his eyes. He was tall enough that, to him, they probably all looked like primary schoolers. "Blimey, they're young."

"So am I, remember?" Lily smiled.

"Right, right," he said. "So tragically young."

"_Benvolio,_" Sirius called out. Lily couldn't place his voice, but Remus zeroed in on it easily. Sirius always distracted at the perfect moment, she had to admit.

"Your lover is calling."

Remus gave a rakish smile and moved to scratch his head, forgetting about his hat; it dropped rather sadly to the floor, and he stooped—loosely, somehow, like he was held together by worn-out rubber bands—to pick it up before it could be trampled by any number of costumed feet.

"That," he finally replied, placing the hat messily on his mousy head, "is _purely_ speculation and there is _no_ concrete evidence of their relationship in the text."

"You lot have always been rather good at keeping secrets, I guess."

"_Benvolio!" _

"Give Mercutio my love," she smiled.

Remus winked and disappeared into the crowd.

Lily liked him when he was buzzed. She found him a moment later, with Sirius, James, and Peter in tow, but couldn't bring herself to join them. Though she had to admit, they all looked very…vivacious in their tights.

Mary must have snogged the right person, because the music shifted to something faster, more upbeat. She'd never bothered familiarising herself with wizarding bands. All she could say about the song was that it made the room a little too loud.

Taking a sip from her bottle, unwilling to join any of her friends and even more unwilling to ask herself why that might be, Lily did what she did best: made her way towards the fire.

It was already very warm in the common room, and it was worse near the flame, but watching the burn made her feel better about the chaos.

She didn't pay attention to much else for a while, sipping her wine absently, and when Sirius sat down next to her, Lily noticed that the bottle was nearly half empty. She put it aside as he started to talk.

"Lily bloody Evans, sitting alone by the fire in the middle of a raging party," he smiled. He didn't seem very sober. She wasn't sure how much time has passed since she sat down, but it didn't matter much; Sirius always drank like the world was ending. He was a lightweight, too. "Don't think I'm surprised."

"The world is on fire, Sirius," she said.

She wasn't perfectly sober either, Lily remembered. Luckily, he didn't seem to hear what she'd said.

"Y'know, I was talking to Marlie the other day," he started.

"You talk to her every day, Sirius."

He shook his head. "This was _significant_ talking, though. This was conver-fucking-sation."

"Oh, do go on."

"We were talking about _you_, Evans."

This caught her attention. "Do go on."

Sirius needed no encouragement. "You know, I never realised you were such a fucking mystery."

"What?" She frowned.

"You. You're entirely bloody unknown. I don't know a thing about you. Don't think anybody does."

Lily found the notion offensive, though she had no idea why. "Being private doesn't make me a mystery, Sirius. I just don't feel the need to talk about myself—"

"And I _know_ about being all shut-up. I can talk, because I know." Every word he said was unnervingly deliberate. "My little brother's gearing up to be a fucking Death Eater."

"Just because Regulus is in Slytherin doesn't mean—"

"My whole family is fucking Death Eaters, Evans. There's a war going on and my entire ruddy family is on the other side."

Lily knew about his family's reputation, but she never knew how true any of it was. She'd always assumed he played up the idea of Slytherins being evil—his entire family being evil by association—the same way he had on the train in first year.

"Do they…do they have the mark?" She asked quietly.

Sirius laughed so loud it made her start. "They're card-carrying members, dear—signed their names all over the bloody book."

"Oh." This made her feel guilty for some odd reason.

"The chances that my family kills you are probably crazy high, if you think about it. They're all his fucking lackies."

Learning about Sirius made her a bit uncomfortable. "Oh, um—"

"Are you just worried about that all the time?" He asked, turning to look her in the eye. His were uncannily clear. Lily wondered if he was drunk at all. "Do you have to walk around school worried that somebody'll off you whenever the hell they want?"

Lily swallowed.

"Oh, you aren't going to talk, are you." It wasn't even a question. She could hear the disappointment in his voice.

"I…" she muttered. "I'm going to get air. Some air."

Standing suddenly, Lily left the fire, left the crowd, and left the common room altogether.

In no time, James was upon him. "What did you say to her?"

"For somebody who's over Lily, you are _incredibly_ attentive to her comings and goings."

"Could you stop being cryptic for one damn second?"

Sirius looked insulted. "That wasn't even cryptic, mate. You're losing your touch."

James rolled his eyes.

"If I wanted to be cryptic, I'd say that Evans is worse than I am. And then," he added, touching a finger to his temple like he was giving a particularly good tip, "not elaborate at all."

"What?"

He shook his head. "You should go after her. She's probably skived off to the Astronomy Tower—that seems dreamy enough for the occasion."

"_What_?"

"You like her, yeah?" Sirius asked; he wasn't in the mood to be confusing, he realised. James would get plenty of that elsewhere soon.

"I don't—I—" He looked very distressed.

"Yes, you do, we all know you do, for Merlin's sake, ace, fantastic. So go to the Astronomy Tower. Tell her she's pretty or smart or whatever; I can't hold your hand through the whole affair, Prongsy."

"I—"

"Just go," he pleaded, rubbing a hand across his face.

James looked very dearly confused, and perhaps a little drunk. He frowned at his friend for a moment, turned to face the crowd, and was gone.

"Ten points to Sirius," he mumbled, rolling his eyes.

.

"Lily!"

The voice, loud and unfiltered, echoed around the Astronomy Tower, jarring her greatly. Before any other question could come to her, she wondered when James started calling her by her first name.

"Oh, good. You're here."

He was a bit distracted—a bit drunk—and she liked the way it made him look. His cheeks were red, which probably had just as much to do with the cold as with the alcohol, and his eyes were even brighter than usual. Ready to start a fire.

Lily was shivering, but he looked perfectly warm.

"Sirius said you'd be up here," He said, moving towards her. She felt her cheeks heat up as he did, maybe from embarrassment, or maybe because he seemed to be radiating the stuff in waves.

By the time she'd caught up to his words, he was standing next to her. Standing would probably be warmer than sitting against the frigid stone, she figured, but she made no effort to stand up. "You were looking for me?"

She could see her breath, and though her thin dress certainly wasn't the warmest thing, James's tights didn't seem much better. Why didn't he look cold?

"When am I not looking for you?" He laughed, shaking his head.

"I'm not sure what you mean," she tried to mask the confusion in her tone.

"I am _never_ sure what you mean."

Lily folded her arms out of frustration and a need for warmth. "Did you have anything you needed to say, or did you just come up here to spout half-arsed, drunken mysticism?"

James frowned. "I just wanted to talk to you."

That was new. "Really?"

"Really. Swear on my toad's grave." His expression was endearingly earnest.

"You had a toad?"

"No, but I have the grave of one." He smiled down at her. Lily didn't feel quite as frozen.

"That's macabre," she said in lieu of any real observation.

"Sirius said you were as bad as him," James said out of nowhere, changing topics too easily, "and wouldn't explain what he meant."

She tensed. "No?"

"So the entire time I was climbing those ruddy stairs, I was trying to figure out what he was talking about. Like, do you have a smoking problem? A rebellious little brother? A…a secret stash of muggle eyeliner hidden away?" He laughed. "Guess that wouldn't be too out there for you, though, would it?"

It was funny, as much as it put her on her guard, and she couldn't help the laugh that passed her lips. "Guess not."

"But I was trying to think of everything I knew about you—y'know, so I could rule things out—but I couldn't come up with anything."

"_I don't know shit about you, Evans_," she quoted, rolling her eyes. She hoped this wouldn't become a trend in her conversations.

"Yes! Exactly," he agreed, ruffling his hair. "Wait, was that actually it?"

"Apparently. That's what he told me, at least."

James shook his head. "I know everything about the bastard—he could've given a better hint."

"I don't think I'm that mysterious," Lily protested with a frown.

"I didn't either, Lily, but the facts—or the lack thereof—speak for themselves."

She bit her lip. "You know things about me."

"I don't think so, actually." He slides down the wall to sit by her, and Lily takes a moment to appreciate how gangly he was, all limbs and moving parts. She stops shivering. "I'd like to."

He said it like it was a request—like a plea, she wanted to say, but cut the idea from her mind. It was too…desperate. Too much.

"Why?" Lily didn't expect the own fierceness that came in her voice. Neither did James, judging by the look on his face. "What about me is even worth knowing, James?"

The question was more derogatory to herself than anything, she thought, but he looked genuinely offended by the idea. "Everything."

She rolled her eyes. "I'm not that interesting."

"Well, then, tell me about yourself, so I can find that out for myself."

"I don't—"

"Do you have any siblings?" He interrupted her next protest.

This was more surprising than anything else so far that night, Lily thought with a start. "A sister."

"What's her name?"

"Petunia. I thought you knew that," she answered. Was that how little people knew about her?

James chuckled. "Lily and Petunia. That's nice. Is she nice?"

Lily knew her laugh was bitter—she knew James could hear it, too—but she couldn't keep it in. "She called me a freak and uninvited me from her wedding, so…could be worse, I guess."

His eyes widened; it was sort of vindicating to see him at a loss for words. _Is this what you wanted?_

"Guess she's not—"

"She's a muggle, yeah."

"See, I didn't know that."

It reminded her of Marlene, how she would spark offense or argument with no idea what to do with the results.

"Why don't you want anybody to know you?" He asked finally. Lily glanced over at him, his rosy face, and saw the fire was still in his eyes. He wet his lips; they were just as pink as his cheeks. She couldn't bring herself to say anything.

Even if she wanted to, she didn't have an answer for him.

"It just seems weird," James pressed. "You have this reputation for being all wide-eyed and dainty…I dunno, wishing on dandelions and leaving parties to go to the Astronomy Tower when it's bloody freezing outside. It doesn't seem like the brand for somebody who thinks Romeo and Juliet got what they deserved."

"I never said that!" Her voice echoed against the walls. She didn't mean to yell, and she flushed as James turned to look at her with his eyebrows sky-high. "I'm so sick of this fucking play."

On top of the unprecedented acid in her voice—which he hadn't heard since the last time he asked her out in fifth year—James wasn't sure he'd ever heard Lily swear.

"I like it," he mumbled.

"Of course _you_ like it!" She tried to run her hand through her hair, but it quickly caught itself in the braids ringing her head. "For God's sake," she muttered, detangling best she could. If he wasn't so stunned by her outburst, James might've laughed.

"Of course," Lily started again, "you like it, James. The world is simple for you—you're this posh little Pureblood who gets everything and never seems to have to face a single consequence, and you can believe in things like true love, and the world being fair, because when has the world ever been unfair to you, yeah?"

His mouth fell open, and if she wasn't so worked up, Lily would've been distracted by how pretty he looked in the cold. She was too upset to remember the weather, even; by now Lily was plenty warm.

"Romeo and Juliet is tragic. I know that, I'm not an idiot. It's a bloody tragedy! I'm not saying that these kids deserved to die, I'm not saying _anything_ like that, I'm just saying that that's. What. Happens. The world is horrific and cruel, and there will always be carnage."

Every word out of her mouth seemed to hurt him, she noticed without wanting to. His face fell just a little, his eyes dimmed in fragments.

_Good_, she thought, even though it hurt her, too.

"It doesn't…" James frowned back at her, tilting his head back to rest against the cold wall. "It's awful, okay? What our world is going through right now is fucking demented, and awful, but it doesn't mean we have to let it ruin us."

He made no attempt to defend himself from the more aggressive parts of her tirade. It made her feel worse. "I'm not ruined, James," she said softly.

"You're not the same as you used to be."

"Sorry, but who the hell is?" Lily was glowering, now, and though it didn't make much sense—her glare was aimed at him, after all—James was glad to see it. "Sorry if going to a school where a quarter of the population thinks I'm sub-human—or sub-wizard, sub-witch, whatever the hell—whatever."

Lily shook her head furiously. She'd lost track of her point. "Sorry if that keeps me from being as starry-eyed as I was before puberty."

"It's not that," James's voice was rising, too; She could sort of feel it in her chest. "It's like everybody's holding their breath, all the time! It's like we aren't allowed to have fun, or to laugh without worrying, or to live without checking behind our backs every other second."

"We're just being realistic."

"You're just _afraid_, Lily," he said, and suddenly he wasn't talking about the world at large; he was entirely focused on her, and though she only felt more and more heat she wasn't sure where it came from. "You're living like you're afraid."

She shook her head, feeling very much like a child. The war was terrifying, but she hardly wanted to admit that to herself, much less this boy who intruded in her life, ruined her silence, and called her choices into question. "Am not."

"I don't believe you," he said with a little breath that wasn't quite a laugh. Lily felt it on her face and was struck by how very close he was—how very long his eyelashes looked behind his glasses, how very rosy his skin seemed in the dim light.

"I don't care if you believe me!" She could hear how hopelessly stubborn it sounded, and James could, too; a smile ghosted across his mouth, and Lily tried to keep her gaze away.

"Ace."

She looked at him, confused. "What?"

"The issue is settled, then, yeah?" The argument was typically _James_, but any hint of a smirk abandoned him. There was no joke in his eyes. "I don't believe you, and you don't _care_ if I believe you, so there's nothing much we can do."

"Stop doing that." Lily matched his gaze, working diligently to keep her eyes from dropping any lower.

"Stop doing what?" James asked, distraction filling his tone. With her eyes locked onto his, it was obvious where his attention was going. She wet her lips without thinking, and noticed his skin redden more without trying to.

"Trying to prove that I'm afraid." Her voice wavered, and she cleared her throat to recover.

"Okay," he said finally. "You aren't afraid."

"I'm not."

"You're not."

They fell silent.

Lily's eyes fell to James's lips once again, and when they came back up, his eyes were on hers.

She didn't notice that she'd moved in to kiss him until it was already happening, and he was warmer than he looked—like sitting too close to a fire, just enough to feel the heat through her clothes, beneath her skin. Lily was very far from cold.

James was still with surprise, but only for a moment. Once he processed the situation, he moved eagerly—fervently—and Lily could feel his disbelief. She understood it.

James was kissing her. She was kissing James.

Lily hoped he would burn her up. As if he'd read her mind, his hands moved to hold her—one wrapped around her waist, the other in her hair. They were startlingly hot and brilliantly distracting. One skimmed up her side and for a moment she forgot to kiss back.

Pulling back, James looked at her, a question in his eyes. His breath came fast; he was burning up just as badly as she was.

It took her a moment to decipher the pause. She remembered, very sheepishly, that she had stopped first. Lily looked him dead in the eye and gave a tiny nod.

His eyes darkened—somehow dark and bright at the same time, brilliant and enveloping—and he was back upon her in an instant. James was absorbing her, melting her, giving her too much heat and nowhere to release it but right back into him.

In his arms, on his lips, Lily couldn't think of anything else. It was bliss.

She buried her hands in James's forever-messy hair and let herself turn to ash.

.

Lily woke up in her bed, still fully dressed in her dainty white dress, her hair an absolute bird's nest.

She sort of expected to have a lapse in memory; that seemed to be what everybody talked about with parties, late nights, drunken nights—not that she had been, really. Just a bit fuzzy; not so much drunk as simply not sober. Despite her expectations, though, Lily remembered the evening clear as Veritaserum; it was just that she found herself a bit distracted.

Her mouth tasted funny—a feeling that she hated more than anything else. Lily brushed her teeth religiously, and to go to bed without doing so was therefore blasphemy. She almost felt betrayed by herself; how hard was it, really, to drag yourself to the sink and put paste on a toothbrush?

_I snogged James Potter_.

_Oh, shit_, Lily thought to herself, her dental habits forgotten if only for a moment, _I snogged James motherfucking Potter._

At least she'd enjoyed herself. More than she had in months, maybe.

_Christ, this is bad_.

Opting to ignore the situation for as long as she possible could, Lily went through the process of damage control—taking off the rumpled dress, undoing the tangled braids from her hair, brushing her bloody teeth.

_It's Sunday_, she told herself in an attempt to lift her own spirits. Sundays were lovely, especially at Hogwarts. And she wouldn't have to fight her own thoughts on repeat—_oh my God, oh my God, oh my God—_while attempting to focus in class.

_Maybe, if I'm lucky,_ she thought as she left her room, _I can avoid him all day._

The sound of her door shutting was a bit too loud. Lily began to turn instinctively and her eyes met with James, who'd apparently left his room at exactly the same time.

"Shit," she whispered without meaning to.

James's eyes were wide, and his hair was disheveled as ever—which only made matters worse, as the sight of it had her actively restraining herself from reaching up and running her hands through it as she had last night.

He swallowed, and opened his mouth as if to say something, but nothing came out.

A younger Lily Evans would've rejoiced at the sight of a speechless James Potter.

Presently, she was as dumbstruck as him.

"Hi," she said finally, her voice somehow breaking on the one-syllable word.

"G—good morning," he responded hesitantly.

It was difficult to tell if this interaction settled or disturbed the pair; they stood in a weighty, awkward silence for another long moment.

Lily bit her lip. James's eyes flicked down to follow the movement, then lifted back to her eyes.

The déjà vu snapped her out of it, as much as could be done. She glanced away, down the hallway that lead to the common room, and then gave a smile that was meant to be breezy, nearly in his direction.

"Right, have a nice day," she said hurriedly as she began walking towards the door. All she could do was hope he wouldn't follow her.

That would have been rather typical behaviour for him, but instead, James stood frozen; he didn't turn his head, but watched her leave from the corner of his eye.

After the door closed behind her, he tilted his head back until it hit against the wall and let out something that wasn't quite a sigh, closing his eyes and tried to make sense of it all.

.

"There's no way this is going to work out," James said, an unusual desperation in his voice. "Right?"

Remus rubbed his eyes—clearly hungover but not very powerfully different than he seemed most mornings—and shook his head. "I wouldn't say that."

James missed sharing a room with the Marauders very dearly. This year, he'd taken to waking up early simply so he could still be in their dorm first thing in the morning, and today was no deviation from the norm. If anything, it was a special occasion; the young man was in dire need of advice.

He would've taken it from any of the three. His first choice was Sirius, simply because of the bizarre Lily-knowledge he'd begun to spout before, but he was like a corpse in his bed. If corpses could snore.

Remus was a perfectly good option, anyways—probably a better option, speaking rationally.

"She looked like she'd seen a dementor when she noticed me, Moony."

Remus sighed. "Maybe…I dunno, maybe she was in awe? The mere sight of you triggered powerful memories of the rapturous experience of snogging you?"

"Is rapturous good or bad?" James asked. He'd never gotten the hang of all the religious expressions Muggleborns and half-bloods tended to use.

"It's good. Was the snogging good?"

James groaned. "I mean, I was having a good time. It _felt_ like she was having a good time. I dunno, I was kinda distracted."

Trying to be considerate, Remus held in a laugh at his friends frustration. "Stupid question. Lily could've had razor teeth, garlic breath, and scabs all over her lips and you still would've forgotten your own name."

"I did, for a second," he sighed. Remus laughed at this; it was worth the miserable glare he received.

"What the hell do I _do_?"

"Don't really know, honestly," he frowned. "Don't have much experience with girls. Give her space, I guess?"

"She won't do anything about it," came Sirius's groggy, rusty voice.

Remus looked over, only slightly bemused. "Been awake this whole time?"

"Not sure. Did you use the word _rapturous_?"

"Might've."

"Then yeah, I've been awake this whole time." He sat up in his bed. "She's not going to do anything about it, Prongs," he said again, louder.

James looked intensely confused and distressed, but this was an expression that had been on his face since he woke up—nothing new. "What d'you mean?"

Sirius smiled. "This has got to be a major mindfuck for her, yeah? I mean, hating a bloke for years, then going and snog his brains out in the Astronomy Tower—it's not exactly going to be easy for her to gloss over. It's a bit too messy for Evans, I think."

"You think she's just going to clam up and shy away from the whole thing?" Remus asked doubtfully. "Doesn't really sound like her."

James, however, clearly wasn't surprised by the prediction. In fact, it looked as if Sirius had confirmed his precise fear.

"Sounds like the her I know."

It sounded like the girl he'd heard in the Tower.

"Think you might be buggered, Prongs," he heard Peter say sleepily.

"Is that really all it takes to wake you lot up? A crisis?" Remus asked. "Because that would've been nice to know about five years ago."

"There's no way Lily Evans would have snogged James Potter five years ago, mate," Peter laughed.

"We only wake up for the monumental stuff."

James gave a dramatic sigh. "Glad my suffering is good for something."

Sirius winked. "Happy to help."

.

"Mary, you _crush _the bean, not slice it," Lily corrected. She tried to keep her tone gentle, but Potions was not her friend's best subject, and it was difficult not to get frustrated—especially on top of everything else she was _already_ frustrated about.

"Right, sorry," she said in a small voice. At the beginning of the year Mary would question all of Lily's instructions—the ones that deviated from the instructions of the book, at least—but by November she'd learned better. When it came to Potions it turned out _yes Lily, okay Lily_, always resulted in the best marks.

Lily was somewhere between a complete daze and a hyper sort of focus. For instance, she was perfectly aware of James, even though he was sat behind her.

She was also aware that Severus was spending a lot of time hovering around their station; that may have just been her paranoia. Their table was near the supply table, Lily reasoned with herself. She'd always been a bit too attentive to his movements anyways.

It made no sense, but Lily wondered if he could tell, just from looking at her. Looking at James, maybe. Looking at the way they tried not to look at each other.

She was just being paranoid.

The guilt that creeped its way into her chest, settling on her heart, only frustrated her more. He had no _right_ to make her feel guilty. Not that he knew she was guilty—not that he even knew that she'd kissed James, for God's sake, _get a hold of yourself_—but that didn't make her feel better at all. It felt like she was lying to him. _What gives him the right—_

Lily locked eyes with Severus without meaning to. He looked…afraid.

She was just being paranoid.

"Lily?" Mary asked, like it wasn't the first time she'd tried to get her attention.

She jumped a bit, turning to her friend. "Yeah?"

Mary pointed at the cauldron. "It's boiling."

"Boiling?" She asked with alarm, peering at the liquid, which was surely enough at a rolling boil, far too much steam coming from it. "Fuck's sake, Merlin's bloody thigh high stockings, it's supposed to _simmer, _not boil!"

Suddenly very cross, Lily turned on her friend with a glare. "I told you to put it on _low_ heat, Mary."

"I did!" She said defensively. The girl tried to fan away the steam pouring from the cauldron, but it was clearly a fruitless effort. "I only ever do what you say!"

"Well clearly, you didn't, because that cauldron," Lily pointed, "is hotter than the ruddy sun—"

Mary started to sway dramatically on her feet, and her anger quickly abandoned her in favor of concern for her friend, and somehow even more guilt.

"Are you alright?" She asked, but the girl collapsed before she could finish her sentence.

In an instant panic, Lily whipped her head around, trying to see if anybody had noticed the fall, but the steam was unnaturally thick now, almost like a cloud of fog surrounding them. She bent down to check on her, noticing how strangely slow she felt.

"Professor Slughorn!" Lily called in a thick voice. "Mary—"

She didn't have time to say anything else, blacking out and slumping over onto the small girl already on the ground.

.

Lily woke up to the bright white of the Hospital Wing.

Sitting up—which her head protested by pounding—she scanned her surroundings, trying and failing to remember how she'd ended up there.

Her eyes fell on Mary, looking worse than she had before Halloween, in the bed next to her. She recalled blurrily the fog from their cauldron, and watching her friend fall; she didn't realise she had passed out, too.

"Lay right over there, the bed by the window, please," Madam Pomfrey said from the front of the room. Lily didn't know much about the new school Healer, but she certainly seemed the assertive type judging by her tone.

Severus walked into the room, bringing a swollen, bloody nose with him, and Lily forgot her musings on Pomfrey's personality entirely.

They locked eyes.

He looked guilty as he shrunk away from her gaze, slinking over to his bead and staring out the window to avoid her.

He'd looked just as guilty when he was hanging around her cauldron.

Again, Lily remembered the thick steam.

Mary had insisted she'd put the heat on low.

"What," she said, and finding her voice clogged, cleared her voice to try again, "what did you do?"

Severus didn't even flnch.

"What did you do, Severus?"

This was the first time she'd spoken to him in a year.

"Severus, what did you do?" Lily asked again, getting louder, disliking the hysteria she heard from herself.

Ignoring the escalation, Severus kept his eyes glued to the window.

"Severus—"

"Good, you're awake," Madam Pomfrey said briskly as she entered the wing.

Lily kept her eyes on the guilt boy across from her.

"You and your friend inhaled quite a bit of dangerous vapor—what potion was it you were making?" She asked. Somewhat resentfully, Lily noticed that she sounded suspicious—as if they'd poisoned themselves to skive off class.

"It was a basic sleeping draught," she answered, crossing her arms.

"Makes sense, then. If you made any mistakes, that in combination with the heat being too high would—"

"I know how sleeping draughts work, ma'am," Lily interrupted. Her words weren't directed at the Healer, but the older woman huffed indignantly.

"Well, I am dearly sorry to have insulted your competence," Pomfrey snarked. "I'll be sure to remember in the future that you are impervious to any human folly."

"I'm sorry," she said with very little feeling behind it. In the back of her mind, Lily felt horrible disrespecting the woman like she was, but her anger towards Severus—who'd obviously tampered with her potion—overrode her Head Girl instincts. "It's just that I _don't_. Not with potions. You'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who'd _believe_ that I messed up something as simple as a sleeping draught."

Severus shifted uncomfortably; the creaking of the bedsprings gave him away.

"In fact," she finished with her unwavering stare, "they'd be more likely to believe somebody messed with my cauldron on purpose."

The bedsprings squeaked their protest once again.

"I'll keep that in mind." Madam Pomfrey said contemptuously. "Wherever the fault may lie, you're free to leave. They're still serving dinner."

"Thank you," Lily said as she rose, finally remembering that a Healer would make a horrible enemy. "Sorry if I seem rude, I'm just…very shaken up."

Pomfrey adjusted her apron. "Everybody makes mistakes, dear."

Without meaning to, she hesitated as she passed Severus's bed, glancing at him one more time.

"Ask who did _this_, if you're so good at solving bloody mysteries," he mumbled in a low, venomous tone, pointing to his own crooked nose. Lily continued walking as if she'd not heard him at all.

.

"I don't need a bodyguard, you know." Lily stopped cold in the middle of the hallway.

James looked at her, bewildered. It was the first thing she'd said to him since their encounter Sunday morning. "Sorry?"

"Your protection, whatever the hell you think it is."

He frowned. "I usually walk you to our dorms. Do you…do I need to stop—"

"I'm not talking about that, James. I'm talking about Severus and his broken bloody nose."

"How do you know about that?"

James felt like he was a little kid again; his mother coming home from work to find messy handprints on the walls, obvious evidence of clumsy magic, the shed door left unlocked from an unsupervised flight around the grounds. He had plenty of experience with breaking the rules. He knew what to expect.

The difficult part was breaking rules you didn't know existed—and those seemed to be the only sort of rules Lily had.

"So it _was _you, then," she said, looking both upset and a bit haughty.

"Well, I mean—yeah, but I mean—why do you—"

"I don't need you fighting my battles, Potter."

It was a small, stupid thing, but hearing Lily say his name like that stung, just as bad as it always did.

"He basically poisoned you, Lily. It was obvious, how much time he was spending by your stuff—"

"—oh, so you were keeping tabs on me—"

"—and it was _scary,_ this huge cloud enveloping you guys, not even seeing you collapse from how thick it was—we thought you might've _died_—"

"—so you had to go running in with some stupid grand gesture and breaking somebody's fucking face—"

"Why are you still defending him?" James asked suddenly, angrily.

Lily recoiled. "_What_?"

"He hangs around with Death Eater wannabes, he calls you awful things to your face and behind your back, he slips Merlin knows what in your cauldron for Merlin knows why, and here you are, angry that he got a fraction of what he very well deserves!"

She stared at him, disbelief and outrage blooming on her face, and stormed off down the hallway.

"Oi! Don't avoid—"

"Just _shut up_, James!" Lily nearly screamed, spinning back around with a furious glare. "For once in your life, just shut your fucking mouth!"

James froze.

"What do you—who do you think you are? What do you think this is?" She asked. Her voice ricocheted around the narrow hallway like shrapnel, filling up the space uncomfortably. "Do you think I'm your fucking princess, or something? Your bloody Juliet? If you break enough bones for me, I'll fall into your arms and we can ride off into the sunset?"

Lily laughed. "Are you trying to save me from the big, bad Slytherin?"

"He's not your _friend_, Lily, he's a fucking—"

"Maybe he's not my friend anymore, but don't think for a minute that gives you any sort of high ground, because Sev would never—"

"Merlin's bloody sake, are you just going to ignore what he's done?"

"I don't care what you think, James! You don't have any say in the matter!" Lily yelled. "You don't know _anything _about Severus, and you definitely don't know anything about _me_—that doesn't suddenly change just because you put your tongue down my throat, you know—and I don't need you nosing your way into my life and complicating everything!"

There was so much derision in her words it made James wince. Where had this come from?

"I would really appreciate it," she said, closing her eyes and taking a slow breath, "if you would just _leave me alone_."

This time, James gaped openly as Lily stormed away from the argument; he stood there much longer, entirely unable to understand what had just happened, after her door slammed shut.

**i'm constantly re-reading my stuff and noticing little errors, so this is actually like a more fine-tuned version of the story on ao3. you're welcome dudes**


	3. part three

The atmosphere in the Muggle Studies classroom was oppressive.

Awful. Frozen. Heavy. It was not quite unfamiliar to the students who bore it—something they'd felt all year, ebbing and flowing in a poisonous wave over their heads—but this day, this moment, was somehow worse than anything they'd found before.

It was familiar, but unbearable all the same.

Class had technically started minutes ago, but nobody spoke. Professor Cuffe was sat at her desk, everything typically witty and bright drained from her eyes, and though her skin was ruddy with emotion she looked disconcertingly lifeless.

Lily thought it was odd that the _Prophet _covered the story.

When she considered it, of course it made sense—Magic-on-Muggle crime certainly warranted front page coverage—but a smaller, simpler part of her mind couldn't make sense of it. If her mother was killed, if her sister was killed, would they be plastered on the front page just the same?

Would she look the same as Cuffe did now? Halfway between wrecked and empty and too far down both roads to care either way?

Maybe Adam understood. Maybe Lily could try to. All the Mudbloods, the Half-Bloods, maybe they could try their hardest to understand, take the feeling that'd rooted itself in their chests and imagine it magnified, imagine it pushing and stretching until their ribs cracked, until they couldn't breathe. Somehow, though, Lily knew none of the seventh-years understood.

They were all far too young to be married, to be in love, she thought.

To be in love and then to lose it.

"Professor…?" Kerry asked at the five-minute mark.

_Pureblood_.

Lily didn't mean to think it, but she could hardly force the word from her head.

Matilda Cuffe looked up absently. After a moment the words seemed to register, some light reading in her eyes. "Oh, Merlin, have I…how…sorry."

She rubbed a hand over her face, succeeding in making it redder but no livelier, making no move to stand. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay, Professor," Remus said softly.

Why had she come to class? Surely nobody expected her to teach given the circumstances.

"No, it's…" She gave a heavy sigh. "I'm alright."

"You don't have to—" Mary tried to say, her voice breaking off too easily.

"No, no, I…today is the last day for _Romeo and Juliet_. It's about time we moved on."

Lily expected to hear something dark in her tone, but it couldn't be found; it was purely hollow.

"I don't know if you lot noticed, but I've kept my views to myself during our discussion. It was difficult, at times. Your opinions…hearing what you've had to say, hearing what children in these days think of children in those…it's been very educational for me, honestly. Sort of heartbreaking, too, I suppose.

"I'm sure it's not necessary for me to inform you of this, but we are living in terrible times—depraved, horrible, devastating, senseless…" she took a breath as if to collect herself, but her voice still wavered. "Terrible times. This is not a place where children should be growing up, I think. It's certainly not a place for love."

Her voice caught on the word in a way that made Lily's eyes water without her permission. She hated it, hated this, hated the weight of tragedy that'd forced its way into the classroom. She had to fight herself to stay in her seat, to keep from fleeing. _Again_.

"The comparison hadn't really occurred to me when I assigned the reading. When you lot came in, though, flooding the room with more opinions and energy and _passion_ than this classroom has probably ever seen, I realised. I don't know if you did, but I realised that we're in the same place they were. That this story hits perhaps too close to home."

Lily shifted in her seat. She didn't want to listen; didn't want to hear; didn't want to look any deeper than an old Muggle playwright and names on paper, in storybooks, in the _Prophet_; didn't want any of it to be real.

Her crimson nails aged poorly, chipped so severely that only spots of colour remained, but the colour still haunted her. _Violent ends._

"Romeo and Juliet were victims," Cuffe said forcefully. "Not of their own folly, or rashness. They were given a death sentence for falling in love at just the wrong moment."

The witch was crying now, and she made no effort to conceal it. Lily's fingers blurred in her vision.

"They had their entire lives ahead of them, and they fell in love at _just _the wrong moment. He…they didn't deserve…it's not…" She let out a sob like her voice giving out. "I'm sorry."

_Not here_, Lily thought, and the last of her restraint abandoned her. She left abruptly, left thoughtlessly, left her bag, her friends, and a destroyed professor behind.

.

She wanted to let loose the second she choked out the password and entered the common room, but there was a cluster of fourth year boys right by the door, clearly skiving off class. They jumped to attention when they saw the Head Girl enter, but right then they were nothing more than blurry obstacles.

Rushing past them and to the back wall, Lily tried to blink the tears out of her eyes, hardly able to find the small golden mark with her vision so impaired. No matter how many she tried to banish, though, it seemed that more followed. She resorted to feeling out for the raised, cold metal blindly, feeling a wash of relief as it passed underneath her fingertips.

"_Amabo te,_" she whispered desperately, and disappeared behind the door as quickly as she could.

The fourth years stood dumbfounded. The petty joy of their bad behavior vanished, leaving them with confusion and whispers of concern. There was no laughter among them as the portrait-hole door swung open once again, several minutes later.

"Did you see a girl run through here?" James Potter asked, an uncomfortable intensity in his eyes. "Red hair, upset looking? Head Girl?"

Any other time, they would have grown giggly and excited that _the _James Potter—Quidditch Captain, Head Boy, Man of Every Hour James Potter—was talking to them; they would have adopted that strange, over-masculine that only highlighted how boyish they still were.

Today, they only pointed. "There was—she made a door appear—"

"Thanks," the older boy said distractedly, setting off in the same direction, whispering the same words the children couldn't make out.

They watched the door disappear again and began to wonder why they'd ditched Herbology in the first place.

.

James probably shouldn't have run after her like that.

They hadn't spoken for days after their argument in the hallway, and they had barely managed cool politeness this past week. Her words still stung every time he remembered them—which was _often_. Every time he saw Snape and his bloody nose he wished he could do more.

None of it mattered when he saw her so upset in Muggle Studies. He'd seen her tense up, how she couldn't bear to look at Cuffe, and as the entire class sat stunned both by the professor's words and Lily's retreat, James was already jumping to his feet.

He would've gotten there faster, probably, but she was already out of sight when he'd left the classroom; he tried the Astronomy Tower first. With his knowledge of Hogwart's secret passageways, he'd assumed he'd beat her there; instead, he'd waited in the bitter wind for about five freezing minutes before he guessed he'd been wrong.

_Maybe_ _she hasn't been to the Tower at all since Halloween_, James wondered.

He'd been all momentum making his way across the castle for the second time, but he hadn't noticed his own intensity until the door slammed shut behind him.

Right at his feet, barely a metre into the hidden hallway, Lily sat crumpled on the stone floor, her sobs echoing softly.

James stopped cold.

She looked up at him, and his heart squeezed horribly at the sight of devastation in her face.

"…hi, James," Lily said in a strained voice. Hearing his name like that hurt in a confusing sort of way.

"Lily," he said, his voice catching slightly. "I looked for you at the Astronomy Tower first. Sorry."

It wasn't until after he said it that James thought it might be odd to apologize, as if she'd been expecting him to follow her—as if she'd been waiting for him. But she didn't seem to notice, or else she didn't acknowledge it, giving something that was almost a smile. "Too cold."

"Figured that out, yeah," he said awkwardly.

"And I…" her voice dripped away weakly. She looked so small, so ashen in her stone surroundings, that she could've fit in with any of Hogwarts's other ghosts. The hallway encasing them could've been a mausoleum. "I don't feel safe enough there, right now."

"Oh."

James sat down on the floor beside her. His legs were too long to sprawl out in the tight space between Lily and the dead end where the door used to be, so he bent them to fit as best he could.

"I don't feel very safe anywhere right now," she breathed in a way that raised the hairs on the back of James's neck.

"Hogwarts is the safest place on earth, Lily." Coming out of his mouth, it felt condescending.

She locked eyes with him, and though he felt that typical jolt, they gave James no advantage in understanding the way she felt. Lily just looked lost.

"This world doesn't want me, James."

His heart broke, quick and sharp and painful, and James blinked at the feeling. Frankly, he was surprised it'd lasted this long.

"That's not true." The words stumbled out. _I want you. I'm a part of this world, and I can't think of a version of it that doesn't have you. I can't love a version of it that doesn't have you._

But those kinds of sentiments—those grand-gesture, romantic ideas—never seemed to settle well with Lily, so James bit down on his tongue and ignored the taste of blood.

"This world wants me dead." Lily's voice was certain, and though her resolve on the matter seemed unshakeable it did not ease the tears racing down her cheeks.

James could think of nothing else to say. Cautiously, like he was sneaking around a sleeping dragon, trying his hardest not to wake her, he slid his arm around her shaking shoulders.

The dragon pressed her face against his chest; he wondered if she had fire left to breathe.

James leaned against the wall behind him, and managed to get rather comfortable despite the rigid surface—probably in part due to the brilliantly new experience of holding Lily against him. So comfortable, in fact, that the sound of her voice again made him start:

"James?"

He looked down at her, but the sight of Lily nestled against him—so neutrally, with no awkward stiffness but no true warmth either—threw him for a loop. _Seeing_ her made the situation too intimate, too real, too _much_. James swallowed hard as he averted his eyes to the ceiling. "Yeah?"

"Why do you fancy me?"

It may have been the last question he anticipated—not that he was very capable of anticipating anything between them at the moment. James frowned, becoming aware of the way his arm had fallen asleep against her. Class was certainly over by now; people were probably wondering where they were.

"I…I'm not sure I know what you mean," he muttered.

She shifted. "Not really a difficult question, is it?"

How could a girl look so exhausted and still carry such a challenge in her voice?

"Okay," he relented, shaking his head. "I guess I just mean…why are you asking?"

Maybe he could've tried to deny his own affection, but that seemed idiotic, even for him. It wasn't as if he ever tried to hide it; it wasn't as if she ever pretended not to know.

"Humour me?" Lily wasn't answering his question. They both knew that.

"I don't know if—" he started, but trailed off, unsure what he meant to say.

"I'm scared, okay?" She interrupted. James was sort of glad. "There's too much happening, and none of it's new but lately it feels like just _too much_, and I want something familiar right now."

His throat tightened automatically. "Okay," he said with a little strain in his voice, trying to collect his thoughts.

James wondered if she could feel his heartbeat—if she knew what her words did to him, what they always did to him—but she didn't seem all that present. Despite how drained she seemed, the idea of it—of James as something comforting, something good, something familiar—was enough to make his cheeks flush.

In all the time he'd been in love with her—_love_ _is too strong, don't say _love_ when you tell her_—James never actually imagined this conversation happening.

"When I saw you on the train for the first time," he started, and apparently he hadn't given it enough thought, because this was clearly a bad place to begin. _I wondered what a girl like you was doing with a boy like Snape._

"When I saw you," James tried again, "I was amazed by your hair. I'd never seen hair as bright as yours before. And up close, when we were in the same compartment, your freckles were so cool. All of the girls I grew up around basically hid from the sun, and there you were absolutely covered in them."

He risked a glance down at her. _What was he risking? _Over the years they'd mostly faded, but the ghosts of them lingered on her nose, forehead, and cheeks. They matched her eyelashes, he noticed—the same pale reddish-gold.

Noticing his silence, Lily looked up to meet his eyes, prompting James to turn away skittishly instinctively.

"And then when I actually spoke to you?" He cleared his throat, attempting to refocus. "Merlin, I was done for. All fire and excitement, always so lively, always so passionate…it was like nobody could hold you back. Even seeing you angry was exciting," he admitted. "Which probably did more to hurt my years of courtship than anything."

James felt Lily bounce with a bit of laughter, and it lifted his spirits.

"You just…you feel like life. You feel like air. Not like a gentle breeze, though, not like that. It's like…you know that feeling when you've just been running, or you're swimming and you come up for air, when you can breathe again and you really understand why you need to? Like, you feel out of control, because obviously you need air to survive, but it also feels like a gift, like you're finally breathing properly, and it makes you whole? You feel like that."

He was rambling now—he could tell. "Am I making any sense?"

Lily was quiet for a long moment. James wasn't used to anxiety, but in that moment it seized him eagerly; he was certain she could feel his heart racing then.

"It…" she said quietly. "The comparison makes sense. I know the feeling you're talking about. It's just that…" Her voice had a certain stunned, distant quality to it. She felt a bit stiff against him, but James had no idea if he was imagining it or not.. "It's difficult to imagine somebody feeling that strongly about me."

"It's a lot to feel," James agreed, "but you're the only person it makes sense to feel this much about."

Again, Lily fell silent. James felt unbelievably exposed.

"I'm not ready for something like that," she confessed. "I don't…Sirius is right. You're right. Everybody's right. I'm closed off from everything, but that's all I can think to _do_, and I don't think I'm…solid enough to reciprocate something like that right now."

Disappointment filled his chest; at least that feeling was familiar. "That's alright."

"But for the record," she whispered, "you're like fire."

"Fire?"

"Mm," she hummed.

"Not bad," he smiled. James didn't dare look at her again, but if he had, he would've seen that Lily was smiling, too.

.

"I think I'm in love with Adam," Marlene said lightly, breaking the long silence of the dormitory.

Lily and Mary looked up in surprise from the latter's bed. "Seriously?" Mary asked.

"Is that insane?" She asked, her face flushed, her dark eyes glittering with uncertain hope.

"It's entirely mad, Marlene," Lily started with a weak smile, "that it's _taken you_ so bloody long to realise."

The girlish gossip helped to lift her spirits, but the distress from Cuffe's lecture and the _everything_ from being in the hall with James still lingered in her mind. When everybody asked her where she'd been, Lily couldn't bring herself to tell them; it felt more intensely private than anything she'd ever experienced.

Was that fair? Did it even make sense?

Why was it her instinct to keep every moment she had with him a secret?

Marlene frowned. "What, have you all been talking about us behind our backs or something?"

"Since fifth year, I reckon," Mary confirmed.

"Oh, well, _that's_ reassuring," she groaned.

"Cheer up," Mary said, keeping her voice impressively perky, "it's not your fault."

"It's just that so much has happened," Marlene confessed earnestly. "First with his mum, and now with Cuffe's husband, and all of this talk about the play in the first place…"

She shook her head. "Life's too short, yeah? I get that now. There's no time to waste."

Lily felt her face heat up, and though she gave herself strict orders not to think about why, her mind travelled all too easily—too quickly—to James's hazel eyes, his arm around her. She felt a hundred violent ways when she thought of him, and none of them were simple enough to figure out. "I s'pose."

"I think it's great, however you've gotten to it," Mary smiled softly. A month ago, the news of Raymond Cuffe's death would've sent her into a panic attack for the ages, Lily thought, but now she was wonderfully calm; it was confusing, but she decided to be glad instead. With so few things going well she couldn't bring herself to examine the things that did.

_You feel like life. You feel like air._

"I'll tell him at dinner," Marlene said. "Or no…that'll be too gross. And loud. And _public_—Merlin, what if I got food in my teeth?"

Lily could see her talking herself out of it, but stayed silent.

"Just tell him after dinner, then, love," Mary said gently. "It's not as if any of us will be going to bed early tonight."

Their late-night meetings in the common room hadn't diminished; with the intensity of the war ramping up every day, it was only getting harder for the seventh-years to find rest. Even Lily stayed until the wee hours of the morning, unwilling to spend the nights alone. It made everybody else a bit uncomfortable, how she hardly looked James's way, how she fixed him with an icy glare if they happened to catch each other's eye, but it was easy enough for her to focus on the fire and tune out nicely to the restless chatter of her friends.

Tonight, she was unsure of her plan. After he'd come after her, and the words they'd traded—she'd curled up against his side like a bloody cat, for God's sake—was it even possible for Lily to ignore him?

_He called me _air_,_ she thought. Was it even possible for her to be around him?

If Lily remembered properly from her science classes in primary school, fire ate up oxygen to keep burning. When you trapped a flame and it ran out of air, it died out almost instantly.

_Where do we go from this?_

"I might, actually," Lily said before she could think it through. Mary and Marlene turned to look at her with both surprise and concern in their eyes, and she tried not to blanch under their gaze. "After everything that's happened today—"

_Everything _that'd happened that day.

"—I think some time alone would do me well."

"That makes sense," Marlene said, uncharacteristically sensitive. _Maybe it's all the love,_ she thought drily. "I'll let you know how the McKinnon affair goes."

"You make it sound so _dramatic_," Mary teased.

"It _is _dramatic!"

"It's nothing we haven't known about—"

"It was certainly news to me when _I _realised, and frankly it's none of your business—"

"If Adam's surprised, he's much slower than I thought he was—"

"So you can all just bugger off and leave us alone, yeah?"

A beat of silence fell after Marlene had gotten out her final snark. It was the kind of lapse in conversation that always filled itself with laughter, and the three girls were glad to replenish it.

"Good luck, Marlene," said Lily through her giggle. There didn't seem much to go around at Hogwarts lately; she figured they'd use her luck better than she could.

.

"So. Price and McKinnon."

Remus Lupin was something of an insomniac; Sirius had known this since they were eleven.

When they were first years, he would tease him about it—not cruelly, but of course not free of that casual malice children always have—but Sirius felt rather guilty about that once he learned of his "furry little secret".

Now, though the dark circles permanently under his eyes were worrisome, he appreciated Remus's tendency towards sleeplessness. Most nights he stayed awake with him. They'd sit in the common room after everybody else had retired, pushing into the hours that were neither morning nor night, watching for the sun to just barely started bleeding into the deep blue of the sky. He would lament his loss of beauty sleep, but it was the only time the couple really got to be alone.

"Took them long enough," Remus said, stretching a bit before resting his head on the other boy's lap, staring up at the ceiling. This was one of such nights, and though the day had been eventful—with Muggle Studies and later Marlene's confession, too—they were staying up even later than usual.

"Price was so stubborn I thought it'd never happen," he smirked. "Hell, McKinnon's such a pushover I thought it'd never happen. It was a perfect storm of 'not-happening' but they somehow managed not to bugger it."

"Adam's not a pushover," Remus sighed. "He's just not as pushy as you are."

He shrugged. "Pushy works."

"It pisses a lot of people off, if that's what works for you," the other boy laughed.

Sirius began to wind his fingers through Remus's fair hair. "It's efficient, Moony."

He didn't respond, instead focusing on his boyfriend's ministrations, relaxing but trying not to nod off. "I'm just glad they figured it out in time."

"In time?" he asked. "What, do you know something I don't? Is Hogwarts going under siege at dawn?"

"If it's at dawn," Remus yawned, "maybe we should go to bed."

Sirius didn't laugh. "In time?"

Remus locked eyes with the grey ones above him; his expression was sleepy and grim simultaneously. "Things aren't getting any better, Padfoot."

Sirius didn't care for the chill that passed through him at his words.

"Cuffe's getting to you."

"Cuffe has a point. Just not the one any of us want to hear."

They were silent for a while, but not uncomfortably so, the crack of the fire and the rustle of fingers in hair keeping them from isolation.

"Are you going to fight, Moony?"

"'Course I am."

He felt he had known the answer before asking, but the certainty of Remus's words was unsettling. The popping of the fire, the crumbling logs and embers, sounded harsher for a moment. "We keep calling it a war, but I haven't really thought about _fighting_ in it. Against my family."

They weren't really his family anymore, he knew that; it didn't change how wrong it felt. Remus grabbed Sirius's hand, still fussing with his hair, and wrapped his own around it. Sirius moved their locked hands to sit over the other boy's heart.

"I can't kill him," His left the name unspoken, but of course they both knew. "He's—he's a right arse, but he's my _brother_. I can't do that."

Remus squeezed his hand. "Don't be dramatic, Padfoot. It won't come to that."

"You don't know that."

He sighed. "Sirius."

Sirius didn't respond, but he knew he was listening.

"I can't really tell you what's going to happen; I don't think anybody can," he admitted. "I'll be with you, though. We'll be with each other. I can tell you that."

"You really sound like a member of the True Love Brigade now," Sirius said, his tone deliberately level.

"I did say Cuffe had a point."

"Doesn't Mercutio die, too?"

Remus let out something too silent and heavy to be a sigh. "You really did do the reading."

"Just this once." Sirius tried for a smile. "He dies, right? Fighting a battle that doesn't really have anything to do with him? With a family that's not really his?"

The sound of the fire seemed to fill the room too much then. For no apparent reason, Remus felt like he couldn't breathe; in a small attempt to lift the weight on his chest, he moved Sirius's hand from his heart and pressed it to his lips.

"We'll survive where they didn't," he whispered.

And they both wanted it, so desperately, to be true.

.

The Astronomy Tower wasn't the same for Lily anymore.

James mentioned that he'd looked for her there, and Lily never escaped with the intent of being found; he'd interrupted her enough for a lifetime.

So, the Tower was out.

The Great Lake was finally frozen, and would likely remain frozen until spring. Lily preferred it in warmer months, of course, but then it was always crawling with people. She'd stopped coming out there to think about halfway through fifth year, when it'd become clear that it was Sirius and Marlene's new smoking spot.

They didn't come out this far when it was raining; nobody did. To Lily, the faint drizzle over the grounds—just frozen enough to bite at skin—was a sign that she was meant to return to the Lake today. Her mother's insistent nagging played in the back of her mind as she cast another warming charm over herself, her last one having worn off during the walk out. The warmth enveloped her, like a scarf tucking itself around her neck, and it was sufficient, Lily thought, but not satisfactory.

She was used to a new kind of warmth now, despite how quickly she'd lost it. Scared it away.

_No matter,_ she thought, shaking her head to herself. _At least I'm not freezing to death._

Her footsteps were tentative as she approached the edge of the lake, wary of the slick grass and the dark ice over the water. She sat once she arrived, not cold enough or warm enough to feel any more than numb.

Lily preferred running water, unfrozen water, but the Lake was enough. She put her hand against the ice; it took a moment before she felt a chill against her skin.

"Lily?"'

She stiffened at the voice. The chill ran its way down her spine.

"It's freezing out. You shouldn't be—"

"How _dare _you?" Lily asked fiercely, whipping around to face him.

Severus froze in front of her. The rain must've covered the sound of his approach.

"What the hell are you doing here? _Following_ me?"

"I—"

"Or did you come out here to bloody _poison_ me again?" It was unclear if Lily heard James own words in her accusation, but she didn't seem to; she was too mad and too numb to notice.

"I can explain!" Severus said hastily.

Lily scowled. "No you can_not_, Sev!" The nickname came from her instinctively, but it didn't feel right like it used to. It felt like a betrayal. "Why even bother trying?"

Perhaps Snape had come out here with a plan, a script prepared in his head, but now he looked like little more than a deer in headlights. _Say something_, Lily thought furiously. _If you can explain, we can go back to the way things used to be. _

_Please say something._

Severus stepped closer, and Lily searched for a mark on his crooked nose that he knew she would not find. He wouldn't meet her eyes.

"I'm…" he mumbled, barely audible over the hiss of the rain. "I am sorry, Lily."

Lily looked away from the boy before her. Snape looked _pathetic_, she realised. More than he had as a scrawny little boy in oversized clothes; more than he had being dragged around by his horrible, increasingly Dark group of friends; more than he had suspended by his ankles, his face red from embarrassment and exertion. Lily saw him, for the first time, the way everybody else told her she should.

It made her feel no better. "Stay away from me, Severus."

"Lily, I—"

"Could you _please_ just sod off?" She yelled, pushing her hair out of her face too aggressively. His mouth snapped shut in surprise as her voice rang through the grounds. Hers did, too. "I don't want you in my life anymore! And pardon my assumption, but I thought you were fairly clear about not wanting any Mudbloods like me in your life, either."

"It's not—"

"Why are you still trying to _fix_ this?" Lily asked desperately. "Is that what you're trying to do? Do you just want me to make you feel better? Do you—do you want a back-up if your Death Eater friends fall through? Because I'm not going to give it to you, Severus."

If not for the way he flinched, Lily wouldn't have been sure he was hearing her at all. His face was pale, but it always was. His eyes were dark and unreadable and fixed stubbornly on the slick grass at his feet. Her face stung with the rain; her warming charm was beginning to wear off.

"You are getting _nothing_ from me anymore."

To an outside observer, it would have sounded odd. After all, the two hadn't been friends for a year and a half, and hadn't spoken in the time between then in now but once, in the Hospital Wing. It wouldn't have been surprising if her words didn't make sense to Severus himself.

But he understood perfectly.

Lily began to storm away, heeding no caution for the slippery grass beneath her feet, not bothering to renew the charm protecting her from the elements. At that moment it only felt right to be frozen.

"I'm sorry."

She might've heard it behind her, hidden among her angry breathing and her affected footsteps and the strengthening rain, but she let it hit her back and kept walking.

Lily couldn't afford to forgive him anymore.

.

The stormy walk through the castle didn't warm Lily at all. She rushed into the girl's dormitory without knocking, shivering and incensed, and Mary jerked upright on her bed in surprise.

"Lily?" Her baby-blue eyes were wide with concern. "What's happened?"

"Do I look like something's wrong?" She asked sarcastically, giving a turn. Drops of water flung from her hair with the spin, making Mary flinch instinctively, though they were nowhere near hitting her.

"You look like hell," she answered honestly.

Lily gave a thin smile. "Ace. Just double-checking."

This was Marauders-speak, obvious and strange in her voice, but Mary thought better of commenting on it. "Lily, what happened?"

Lily huffed, sitting at the foot of the bed; Mary, willing to lend an ear but unwilling to have her bedcovers soaked, leaned over to grab her wand and cast a quick drying charm. Her Charms work was never the best, but at least her friend was no longer dripping.

"Severus."

The acid in her tone was unprecedented—at least for matters of Snape. Mary was positive she'd never heard Lily say his name with so much animosity.

Of course, Mary heard the speculation of her fellow classmates and Gryffindors. Everybody knew Snape was the one who sabotaged their potion. There were no concrete facts—the Slytherin was too clever for that, too evasive—but they'd all seen the way he lingered too close by, and it couldn't have been a coincidence that two Muggleborns were the victims.

James told Mary that he'd broken Snape's nose as retribution. _Serves him right_.

Lily told Mary that James shouldn't have broken Snape's nose as retribution. _Seriously?_

"You're giving me that look," Lily said, rolling her eyes.

Mary blinked. Her train of thought wandered off more and more lately. Probably just the exhaustion, making her brain behave stupidly. "What look?"

"The _look_, Mary," she sighed. "The 'why-the-hell-is-Lily-still-so-pathetically-caught-up-on-her-old-childhood-friend-who-has-Death-Eater-friends-and-is-awful-to-her' look."

It was a very complex, specific look, apparently, but Mary couldn't be sure the expression had never crossed her face. The thought definitely had. "I'm not giving the 'why-the-hell-is-Lily'-whatever look. And I don't think you're pathetic." That much was true. Nobody was more pathetic to Mary than Mary. "But you haven't even told me what's happened, love."

Finally, the brittle light in Lily's eyes began to thaw. She fell back onto the bed, rubbing her hands over her face, either trying to warm up or to hide. "I talked to Severus."

Mary pursed her lips slightly but tried not to give any looks. "And?"

"I called him a right bastard and told him to get out of my life. I mean, not in so many words, but…that was the idea."

"You did?" She was here to play therapist, Mary knew, so she kept her voice neutral. Internally, though, she was thrilled, however childishly, that Lily was finally cutting ties with her dangerous dead-weight friend. They hadn't been on friendly terms for ages, but she'd never drawn the line in the sand. Instead, Lily had simply…drifted away. She'd never done anything to let Snape know that there would be no more redemption.

Until now, Mary thought with pride.

"He bloody poisoned us," Lily said with a short, bitter laugh. "I guess he figured I didn't get the point with the whole _Mudblood_ thing—"

Mary flinched at the word.

"—and had to resort to physical harm to finally get rid of me."

That was the simplest way to sum it up, she supposed. If it was easier for Lily to act as if Severus wanted to destroy their relationship, Mary had no real problem with the logic—even if it was clearly faulty. Snape was obviously in love with her. The repeated injury he continued to bring was unintentional; he was just that terrible a person.

"Slimy git," Mary said. In her opinion, good therapists shouldn't say much at all.

"Right!" Lily nearly shouted. "I can't believe it!"

"Right!"

"After everything we've been through!"

Mary let the comment sit. It was impossible for Lily to think of the Slytherins the way she did, and she knew that. No amount of slurs, unsubtle comments about her blood, or ultimately harmless "poisoning" would ever equal one swift, well-aimed _Crucio_ alone in dark corridors.

She was less than human to them. They were nothing more than demons to her.

Lily didn't notice her friend shiver. "After everything terrible he's done…everything terrible his _friends_ have done…I can't give him my sympathy anymore. I can't worry about him. Not in Hogwarts, or my head, or anywhere else here may bloody well pop up."

Mary bit her lip. "He's not a good person," she said, her voice barely audible.

Lily stiffened, but it seemed to be reflexive, because she relaxed a moment after. "I know that."

_Now_.

.

The Marauders were oddly lethargic that afternoon. Pranks had died down considerably—gone down nearly to none, in fact—since their last catastrophic one. None of the boys wanted to do homework, or wander the halls, or sneak down to Hogsmeade.

The only thing any of them seemed to be up to at the moment was listen to James wallow.

"She said she wasn't ready?" Sirius asked.

James nodded solemnly. "Since you're the sodding expert, apparently, d'you think you could explain that?"

"It's absolutely _nothing_ new, Prongs," Remus answered instead. He tended to be an expert on most things, though, so James let it happen. "Lily just needs space, for God's sake."

His cheeks flamed. "It's not as if I'm the one pushing things."

"You're always chasing after her, though," Peter added.

Apparently, it was now time to criticise James's approach to his relationship with Lily—his confusing, perhaps nonexistent relationship with Lily—for the past three years. "Not anymore—"

"Not like asking her out, or anything, anymore," Peter corrected himself hastily, his cheeks turning as red as James's own. "Just…y'know…the night you snogged, you followed her up to the Astronomy Tower. Then yesterday, when she left class all upset, Sirius said you were out of your seat after her straight away."

"Okay, yes, so maybe I _chase_," James admitted, though somehow he made his concession sound impenetrably stubborn. "A bit. Occasionally. But I didn't kiss first. And I wasn't the one curled up against her like a ruddy cat." He heard his own frustration and, disliking the way it made him sound very much, he tried to moderate his tone. "I _understand_, if she needs time. I've talked to her enough to know that she probably _isn't_ ready for a relationship, or anything like that, with everything going on. And it's not like I've had any problem with waiting before.

"It's just all of these ruddy mixed signals that're going to do me in." James ran a hand through his hair frustratedly. Every time he'd done it since Halloween, he worked very hard not to think of Lily—Lily weaving her fingers through the mess of it, Lily gripping it tightly when he bit her lip—but he was very rarely successful in that endeavor.

He ran his hands through his hair a _lot_.

"Wormtail's on to something, I think," Sirius mused. "If you didn't chase, you wouldn't be giving her the opportunity to do things she regrets."

"'Things' is a _terrible _nickname for James, Padfoot." Peter chuckled at his own joke. His friends were pricks sometimes.

James clenched his jaw and wished this conversation weren't quite as upsetting.

He wanted to be a lot of things to Lily, but never a _regret_.

"So…I just leave her alone," he said. "Really, genuinely, absolutely leave her alone."

His three friends looked back at him with varying levels of sympathy in their eyes; even Sirius's, whose were tinged with a joking gleam, were difficult for James to face.

"I mean, she didn't say she _didn't_ fancyyou, Prongs," Remus shrugged, adopting a feeble smile. "Just that she's not ready for somebody to fancy her as much as you do."

"Blimey, I don't think _I'm _ready for somebody to fancy me like Prongs fancies Evans," Peter giggled again.

That was about James's limit, and he shot Wormtail a glare. "Play your cards right, and you'll never have to worry about that, mate."

Sirius laughed loudly, and Remus held in his as best he could, but Peter just rolled his eyes. It didn't look like he was affected much by the comment. "Bugger off, Prongs."

"Sorry, Wormy, but I love you too dearly to stay away."

"Suddenly," he said, "I feel a lot worse for Evans."

James winked, ignoring the ugly feeling squeezing his chest. "You're just jealous."

.

Everything stopped all at once; Lily was starting to understand that.

When the sun sets the day ends all at once; when somebody says goodbye they're gone all at once; when a person dies they're dead all at once.

Lily tended to cling, she realised. Not that anybody would term her as clingy. It was just difficult for her to let go of things, and it seemed that she was losing more every day. There was nothing she could hold onto that would never end.

The fire mused on her thoughts, and a glowing log fell in agreement. She tried to remember a time where the fire of the Gryffindor common room was not lit. None came to mind. Fire was in a permanent state of entropy, of self-destruction; it always ended up putting itself out. It didn't make sense that one could go on forever.

Magic kept it burning, obviously. It wasn't difficult to figure out. Probably not even a difficult spell to cast. Tucking her feet under herself on the couch, Lily recalled a curse they'd learnt in sixth year—one that would suck the air from a room, suffocating everyone in it. Surely it would suffocate the fire, too.

She used to think magic could keep everything alive and lovely forever.

Maybe it could, if that was the way everybody decided to use it.

Another log crumbled, and Lily tried to remember how she'd landed on this train of thought.

It was lunchtime, but she wasn't hungry, and the common room was blissfully empty. If it hadn't been, if some first-years were busy playing tiddlywinks or some fifth-years having their first kiss, Lily would've had to shut herself up in her Head's dorm, alone.

With a private room, it may have been a good idea to make that her main haunt for isolation, but Lily would never be able to stomach it. She needed something moving—alive—to keep her mind busy, to keep her sane; the rustling trees she can see from the Astronomy Tower, the wind in her hair; the rain and the ice of the Great Lake; the bright fire, now, of the common room.

Surely somebody would come along soon and take this from her, too. Why could Lily never be _alone_ these days?

The fire snapped at her. She lifted a fingernail to her mouth and bit it, grimacing at the taste of varnish in her mouth. She glared at the offending pigment, cornflower blue and patchy, suddenly very angry with it.

"What's the point of having you if you don't stop me from biting?"

Lily frowned. "Oh, bullocks. I'm talking to myself now."

This fire wasn't doing enough to keep her sane.

The portrait-hole swung open, and Lily turned too quickly to the sound, unsure if she was glad or irritated by the interruption. Her cheeks flushed when she met eyes with James; she dropped her hand from her mouth.

He simply waved at her on his way to the golden mark at the back of the room. Lily turned back to the fire but listened to his footsteps, the barely audible _amabo te_ he whispered, the sound of the gently closing door.

She frowned; the fire scolded her for it.

"Bugger," she sighed, grabbing a throw pillow and pressing it against her face.

.

"Let's take a walk, Potter," Marlene said with a quirked brow, putting a forceful hand on the boy's back.

James looked up from the table with surprise. "Going to ask me to Hogsmeade?" He asked around a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

She rolled her eyes. "Actually, I was planning on taking you to some empty classroom for a quickie, if that's alright."

"Are you cheating on me, Price?" Sirius piped up, sounding predictably offended.

"I am also here," Adam smiled. Marlene looked at him and smiled back, her stony expression gone, and didn't even notice the sauce on the side of his mouth.

"Hey, if we're going off to shag, Price, I'd appreciate you not making love-eyes at your boyfriend right before." James took one last gulp of pumpkin juice before he stood.

Marlene smiled harder at Adam, and Adam smiled harder back.

"Merlin! You're making me jealous here," he tried again.

She turned to fix him with a glare. "Somebody's eager. I'll bring him back in one piece," she told the table as they walked away.

"We wouldn't mind if you didn't!" Sirius called after them.

"Yes, we would!" Adam disagreed. Marlene smiled again at his voice, and James shook his head with a massive grin.

"You two are bloody adorable, you know that?"

The smile left her face easily; it was apparently only charmed out by McKinnon, like a shy, finnicky cat. "I'm here to yell at you."

They exited the Great Hall, and the sounds of chatter and clinking spoons traded itself for the scattered conversation of the corridor. Students of all years flitted about, joking or laughing or simply sitting together, not talking at all. The many halls of Hogwarts were always full after meals; tonight, James and Marlene were nothing but another post-dinner stroll.

"Oh?" James asked, trying to think of anything he'd done in the past few days to piss her off.

"You and Lily are being weird."

"I've hardly been around her this week," he frowned.

She stopped to face him, lips pursed, eyebrows raised like he was an idiot. How was he the idiot this time?

"What's wrong with that?" He asked. "Has she told you she's upset by it?"

Marlene rolled her eyes again, crossing her arms. "Obviously not, James, because we all know she doesn't bloody _talk_ about her feelings. I just think it might."

James tried not to get his hopes up with the idea. "I dunno. Just haven't been around her lately. I'm not—not avoiding her, if that's what—"

"You're avoiding Lily?" She accused sharply. A pair of second-years ran past, shrieking something about baby toads and cauldrons, and James was quite suddenly reminded of a stern mother.

"I just said that I'm _not_, Marlene, if you'd _listen_—"

"There's no reason you'd say you _aren't_ avoiding her unless you _are_, I'm not thick—"

"Do you know how a conversation works?" He asked frustratedly, running a hand through his hair. "Y'know, asking questions, getting answers, waiting a minute so the other person can get a ruddy word out? Is that a familiar concept to you?"

Marlene looked unaffected by his distress; she stood, statuesque, arms still crossed solidly across her chest. "Why are you avoiding Lily?"

"I…" he tried to think of a decent way to explain, and came up empty. "Because she asked me to."

"She _asked you_," she repeated, sounding doubtful.

"I mean, not literally, but she…we've had a few conversations that made us think it would be best if I did."

"Us?"

James blushed. Before he could answer, a Ravenclaw girl—about fourteen, from the looks of it—walked up to him and grinned. "Do you need something?" He asked, trying to be a good, polite Head Boy.

"My friend said she thinks you're fit," she said blithely, pointing to a girl across the hallway who was blushing furiously.

Marlene made no attempt to cover up her laughter. James felt he had to try, at least. "Oh, well, that's very…nice of her."

"She wants to ask you to Hogsmeade."

"That's, uh, very—"

"This is _very_ charming, really, but Potter isn't interested in twelve-year-olds," she was nonplussed by the clear look of offence on the younger girl's face, "and we were in the middle of having a conversation, so it'd be best for all of us if you bugger off, I think."

The Ravenclaw didn't move, her eyes as wide as saucers, and James had to work hard to keep from laughing.

"No?" Marlene asked the glaring girl. "Right, then."

She began walking down the corridor; James knew he was meant to follow, and so he did, casting an apologetic glance at the girl as he went.

"Well, that was—"

"Who is _us_ and how thick are they to tell you to avoid Lily?"

"Blimey, you're a girl on a mission."

"You're damn right, Potter." Marlene allowed herself a little smile.

"It was Remus and Peter and Sirius."

She was dead silent in response, and James got the sense she was thinking about what an idiot he was again.

"And me," he added. "I mean, it was my choice. They just led me to it."

Marlene stopped, and had to hold James back before he could climb onto the moving staircase in front of them without thinking. It was more thinly populated in this area, and the halls were oddly quiet; even the paintings were subdued, chatting mildly amongst themselves.

"I can't figure out what's going on with you two," she said, shaking her head.

James fiddled with his glasses. "Me either, if it's any consolation."

"That makes it worse, I think."

"Me too," he sighed after a beat. "Are…are you worried about her? Is that why you're asking?"

Marlene nodded, her eyes fixed on the staircase as it fit itself to a new landing. "Aren't you?"

He started up the staircase. After seven years, they both knew where it would lead; the movements weren't mysterious or intimidating like they used to be. "I was trying not to be."

"Me, too."


	4. part four

Lily felt safe in the isolation of the Astronomy Tower again. Finally.

It was late November, and the frigid wind was not easily ignored. People only ventured out there at this time of year if they wanted to feel numb, but most preferred the more comfortable option of firewhiskey to such brutal cold. Among other things, probably—things Lily wasn't privy to.

She'd skipped breakfast to come out as early as possible. Everybody was surely in the Great Hall then. The loud, clamouring, crowded Hall. Lily was glad to be alone, but she also felt…lonely.

_Well that's daft,_ she thought with a shiver._ Isn't that the point?_

It was the sort of question that should have an obvious answer. The wind was playing with her hair, toying with it, yanking on pieces and whipping them into her face—trying to hit a nerve.

James wouldn't be chasing after her today. Or tomorrow, likely. At no point in the foreseeable future, Lily reckoned, would James Potter spend any more time worrying about her, and she couldn't blame him for that. She couldn't blame anyone else for that.

It was a bright, sunless morning, a grey sky eclipsed by clouds. The world seemed so flat and featureless that Lily wasn't sure she was even breathing.

Maybe time wasn't even moving.

Maybe the world wasn't even spinning.

Maybe nothing was happening at all.

The wind yanked at her hair again like a child vying for attention. _You aren't getting away from me so easily._

_Wishful thinking._

Lily shivered.

Nobody spoke about _Romeo and Juliet_ anymore.

It was unfair.

Or a gift.

Or just…confusing.

It was confusing, because what else were they meant to talk about? Benjy Fenwick's latest escapade with some hair-brained fourth year? Because her name was Margorie, and she was a Hufflepuff, and more fit than anybody he'd land his own age. Or should they talk about the first-year Remus found patrolling the halls last week, shaking and crying violently with sick on his face? Because his name was Geoffrey, and he was a Muggleborn, and nobody told him they could use magic like that.

Her teeth started to chatter, so she clamped her jaw shut.

Every moment of discussion on the play had felt like torture, like an attack, but now Lily longed to return to this fixation they'd developed. To let it be the only thing they paid any mind to. She'd hated it then, but now she hated reality more.

Lily remembered her dad telling her once that when people shiver, it's because their bodies are trying to warm up.

Did wizards know that? Or did they figure out warming charms first?

Either way, Lily forced her body to stay still.

No matter how real _Romeo and Juliet_ felt, it would always be fiction. She knew that. Even though she'd worn Juliet's dress, lived as her for a night, kissed as her for a night, it wasn't real. She could keep it at an arm's length in her heart.

What Lily craved more than anything was _distance_. No matter how lonely it made her.

"Lily?"

_Thank God, _she thought before thinking, turning to see Mary before her and shivering violently as she did. She was just as ashen as the sky.

"I'd…I would ask, but. Right. I knew where to find you, so I suppose asking why you're…right, never mind."

She approached Lily, grabbing her hand and ignoring the icy feeling against her skin.

"You need to come to the common room. We're all…waiting, I guess, but…you'll see."

.

James really wanted to speak to her again.

He _had_, of course, plenty of times, scheduling the week's patrols or asking her to pass the peas, but of course that wasn't the same. He wanted to smile at her again. He wanted her to smile back. He wanted to look into her eyes and see the light behind them.

He missed her, which was undeniably stupid.

_I see her every day. I sit with her at lunch. I have quite literally every single class with her. _

That morning he'd run late, and though the Marauders were none of them early risers by nature, James knew by now they'd surely gone down to breakfast without him. He was still fixing his tie as he hurried from his room, down the hallway.

To enter the common room to all of his friends—all staring at him, some with ruddy, tearstained faces—it stopped James faster than an_ Immobulus_. Maybe a _Petrificus._ He definitely wouldn't have been able to move if he'd tried.

His old instinct would've been to make a joke. _Who's funeral is it?_

The thought hid behind a shadow in his head. For a moment, this worried him more than the scene set up before him. James was _bad _at passing up jokes—especially obviously ill-timed ones. When had this instinct died off?

The fire was going in the background as always, but it looked weaker than usual.

Lily was there, he noticed. Lily was there, sitting right there on the couch, staring right at him with tearstained cheeks, her lips parted slightly. Lily was staring right at him and he saw an apology in her eyes, though he had no idea what she was apologizing for.

Sirius stood instantly but fell back into his chair, as if he didn't have the energy to keep up. His face was stony, and his silvery eyes watered. His jaw was tight. He didn't cry, or speak, couldn't seem to do more than stare.

James managed one move in his petrified body: a hard, _hard_ swallow. It hurt.

"Prongs…" Remus started, his voice wavering, but he couldn't manage to get anything else out.

James was too busy looking back at Sirius, trying to ask _what's wrong_ without words, to notice him approaching with Adam's copy of _The Daily Prophet._

"You'll want to…" Remus started again. "I'm sorry."

Frowning, taking the paper from his hands, James lowered his spectacles to catch a glimpse of the headline.

**HEAD AUROR EUPHEMIA POTTER DEAD AT 67**

He barely read the words before they slipped from his vision, fell to the floor by his feet. His shoelace was untied. A moment ticked by. And another. He could feel their eyes on him, an apology on each tongue, and he could hear the headline ringing _EUMPHEMIA POTTER DEAD_ like a joke nobody laughed at.

His spectacles slipped off his nose and clattered onto the floor. Everything blurred, the paper, the glasses, the he ground at his feet, all indistinct and somehow staticky, and James didn't realize that this wasn't just from losing his second set of eyes, so a few tears fell down his cheeks before he could blink them away.

He hadn't made it a step into the room before his day—fuck, before his _life_ was ruined.

James scooped up the paper at his feet and turned his back on his audience.

_EUPHEMIA POTTER DEAD_, he thought as he found the tiny golden scar, by muscle memory because he certainly couldn't see, glasses or no glasses.

_EUPHEMIA POTTER DEAD_, he thought as he whispered the password, _please, I will love, I shall love, amabo te, please, please, _and opened the door.

_EUPHEMIA POTTER DEAD_, he thought as he closed it gently behind him, never slamming, his mum taught him never to slam—

and when he was alone the words screamed in his mind even louder, chasing him to his room, another door he was taught never to slam, especially now that he was going to Hogwarts, now that he'd have neighbours—

and he sank down against that door, feeling something so awful that tears would not soothe it away. He was shaking. Torn open and blown apart. Bleeding something out that he didn't know he had, didn't know he could lose, wasn't sure he could get back.

There was no telling how much time passed before the knock on the door, before the voice he'd probably hear on his deathbed, before "James? Are you…are you alright? I know you aren't. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But…"

Lily trailed off, but she was still at his door. He could tell. For once—for the first time ever, maybe—she'd come to him. Chased after him.

But James was bleeding, he was torn-apart-blown-open, and her voice made him bleed heavier. He cast a silencing charm on the door so Lily wouldn't hear the sobs that didn't help anything.

_EUPHEMIA POTTER DEAD_.

.

Lily sat there far longer than she would've even considered admitting.

He'd left his glasses on the common room floor, and so of course she'd rushed in to return them. It wasn't as if anybody else could get it, so…so it was her responsibility.

She didn't know what to say—or, that wasn't right, but she just knew there wasn't anything she _could_ say—but she couldn't leave him. She was bound. James was—he meant too much to her, whatever he was, he was _too much_—for her to leave him crying alone in his room with a headline like that.

Not that Lily knew for certain he was crying, or that he was on the other side of the door. She couldn't hear anything. There wasn't any good reason for her to stay—she could've easily left the spectacles by the door, nobody was buying that—but there was no way she could leave.

She sat in front of his door, twin to her own, for so long that she lost track of time; when Lily left the corridor, unable to ignore her panging stomach any longer, the first thing she happened upon was Sirius.

Lily was never certain of the difference between irony and coincidence, but the sight of him sitting outside of the door—just as she'd sat in front of the other a few metres down—was surely one of the two.

The common room wasn't empty, but it felt it. The fire looked the weakest she'd ever seen it.

James was the patriarch of Gryffindor. That much was undeniably true, though in any other circumstances all of them would've denied it. He was as good as Godric, in the flesh. It had only been—what, an hour? How long had Lily waited?—without him, but without the life he brought, everybody seemed at a loss. The entire house seemed to be in mourning.

Lily didn't realize they were all such avid readers of the paper.

"Oh, ace, it's you," he mumbled, taking Lily from the thought she felt a bit ashamed to have had. Sirius looked, for lack of a better word, wrecked. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin was paler than usual, nothing even close to a smile on his lips. It was the least Sirius she'd ever seen him.

"Yeah. It's me."

"I was waiting for one of you to come out." Sirius grunted a bit as he stood, stretching in a way that confirmed Lily's suspicion that he'd been there a long while. She knew he would've preferred James to her, by a million times, but that didn't wound her vanity—she felt exactly the same. "Seeing as I don't know the sodding password. Head's secrecy and all that."

He ran a hand through his hair, which seemed to have lost its deliberate messiness in favor of the artless, genuine sort.

Lily swallowed. Talking to him unsettled her, even more now than usual. He didn't meet her eyes. "Right."

"Dinner's passed, and he's probably too…too preoccupied to realize he's starving," he continued. "He didn't even have breakfast."

Her stomach groaned, annoyingly well-timed. Sirius's eyes landed on hers, some recognition in them. "You're probably starving too. Were you with him at all?"

She glanced down at her feet. "I…not quite."

"Right." Sirius gave a grim version of his smirk. He didn't make her spell it out, which was definitely his version of mercy. "Then I 'spose it's time for a trip down to the kitchens."

They set off together. Neither spoke much initially; Lily was intimidated by his brooding energy, and too exhausted from the day—her day of sitting outside James's door, crying intermittently, worrying about the boy she hadn't thought to worry for before—to attempt to breach it. The sky was dark through the windows, just as colourless as the grey morning she'd forgotten all about.

"So you sat outside his door all day," he started after a few minutes, sighing.

Maybe it had been more disinterest than mercy.

"Guess so," Lily shrugged in response. She wondered if she looked like she'd been crying; she could tell that he'd been doing his fair share. Sirius considered her answer for a minute. She could see him come to a conclusion, but had no way of guessing what he'd decided.

"She was like my mum, too," he said after another stretch of silence. She knew she didn't need to respond. "I know I'm not—that whatever I'm feeling, it can't be half as bad as whatever James does, but…fucking hell. She took me in when I was disowned, you know that?"

Lily did know that, but it'd never stood out to her as very significant. James and Sirius had always been like brothers; Sirius had always hated his family. It was a natural escalation. She'd never considered how much that might've meant to him, being accepted into the family he'd always wanted. How kind Euphemia must be to take him in so easily.

She realized her error but refused to correct herself. _How kind she must be. _

"It's just…impossible to think about. It doesn't make sense that somebody as _good _as Euphemia is just…" He swallowed uncomfortably, cutting off a tremble just in time. "Gone. She's just gone. I can't believe that there's a world so fucking awful—much less _our _bloody world—where that can happen."

There might've been a tear streaking down his cheek, but Lily ignored it as they approached the fruit painting by the Hufflepuff basement. He reached out to tickle the pear. Somberly, somehow.

It wasn't until they left the kitchens with armfuls of food that he spoke again. "Bugger."

"What's wrong?" She asked. It felt like the stupidest question she could've asked, but he didn't seem to mind.

"Forgot the cloak," he muttered, mostly to himself. "Didn't even think about it."

"The cloak?"

"Invisibility cloak. James has one, we usually use it when we sneak down."

A thousand questions came to Lily at once, all inappropriate: _An invisibility cloak? A real one? Where did you get it? Where did _James_ get it? How have you gone around for seven years without being found out? God, have you listened in on my conversations?_

She didn't even have to tell herself to bite her tongue on that one. "Well, you're wandering about with the Head Girl tonight, so I wouldn't worry so much."

Sirius gave a dry laugh. "Fair."

The walk back up took a bit longer, encumbered by plates and a few goblets, until Lily felt an unusually strong need to speak.

"You are allowed to grieve, Sirius," she said, shifting a plate of sausage before they could all tumble off.

Sirius looked at her like she was deranged. "What're you on about?"

Immediately, Lily regretted saying anything—regretted the assumption that she knew what he was feeling—but she figured there was no option, save to press on. "Even if she's not your mum. You're allowed to grieve without worrying that you don't deserve to be as upset as James."

"Who said I was worrying?"

Lily saw through it, but she wouldn't make him spell it out. "When Adam's mum died, I was a mess. When I ran off at breakfast?"

Sirius nodded.

She was surprised he remembered. Or noticed in the first place.

Then again, it didn't seem much escaped Sirius's notice.

"I went off to the toilets, and Adam was there. I felt like a complete idiot crying over it when it was _his_ mum that died, yeah? But then…I thought about my dad. When he died. It was like…between me, my sister, and my mum, the house was a vacuum—bugger, that's a Muggle term, isn't it…it was…it was like all of the sadness between us sucked the house dry, I guess. There was no space for anything but grief. But at the same time, it wasn't a competition, yeah? My mum lost her husband. I lost my dad. Petunia lost hers, too."

Lily felt as though she may have lost her point. "But I never thought they were taking grief _from_ me. When there's a loss like this, there's nothing _but_ space for people to mourn. It's not something you have to earn, or an exclusive thing. Whatever you feel, there's a place for it."

Sirius didn't say anything for a very long time. "Maybe you're right, Evans."

"Maybe."

"D'you spend a lot of time giving yourself permission to feel things?"

She felt her face grow hot, though that could've just as easily been from the stairs. "Not really."

_I just spend a lot of time trying not to feel them in the first place._

"Right."

They reached the portrait-hole, and they both said the password at the same time, edging into the room with their carefully balanced plates. The common room still felt empty, wide open and vulnerable, and Lily thought then that her words may have made more sense than she gave herself credit for. Sirius understood too. She thought he did, at least—maybe she was imagining the new softness in his eyes.

"Do you think he'll…?" She couldn't help but ask, but she didn't know how to finish.

_Do you think he'll eat any of this?_

_Do you think he'll open his door?_

_Do you think he'll be okay?_

Sirius made a face. "I'd tell if I knew."

Lily gave a small something like a smile. "G'night, Sirius."

"Sleep tight, Evans." His smile, in reply, was almost watery.

The fire was weak, but it still hadn't gone out. There was something to be said for that.

"_Amabo te_," she muttered, entering the hallway once again.

Lily made it across the hallway—the useless, illogical hallway—without dropping anything, but she was unsure what she was meant to do from there. Leave the plates by his door? Knock again and wait another eternity? Think about all the waiting he'd already done for her?

Maybe she just liked making things difficult for herself, because she set the plates down on the floor and knocked. "James?"

And then Lily waited.

She ate while she waited. The food was almost too much for her stomach, which had been empty all day, but she was glad to fill it anyways.

She was halfway through a plate of beans and toast when she heard a door open. Strangely, her instinct was to look to the end of the hallway—where the door appeared only occasionally, and with nobody outside who could even conjure it—instead of the one she'd been sat in front of for hours. Perhaps, after so long, she'd stopped thinking of it as a door.

_How did James do this?_

"Lily?" James's voice cracked on the two confused syllables, and she turned around slowly. Her back popped. Her bum might've fallen asleep, too, but she stopped paying attention to the complaints of her body when she saw the boy above her.

There were plenty of observations to be made—his eyes were red, his posture uncomfortably sloped, his hair was a bigger mess than she'd ever seen it, which would've been impressive in any other circumstance—but her heart beat her head to making any conclusions, feeling a strong pang of something tragic in her chest.

"I—I have food," she greeted with an unintentional eagerness. "And your glasses."

James blinked down at her; he ran a hand through his riotous hair and Lily's heart dropped like it was on a roller-coaster.

"You don't have to say anything—or I can shut up if you'd like, but Sirius and I went to get this for you and—and you really should eat."

James stepped out of his room and closed the door behind him. Lily's heart unclenched, only slightly. He sat down across from Lily, letting his head lean back until it hit the stone wall solidly, making a sound that probably hurt—or would've hurt if he'd had any space to feel new pain. In this configuration, Lily couldn't see his face, but the torchlight caught the tears that traveled down his neck.

She was still hungry, but she set her plate aside.

James wasn't eating either, but he was breathing, and hearing the fragile sounds move in and out from his chest made Lily think that she shouldn't ask for anything more.

So she sat and breathed with him.

And breathed.

And breathed.

Lily had heard a lot of people say that, after one tragedy or another, the war was finally "real".

She'd said it before, too, though if you'd asked her at any point in the past two years she would've said _of course it's real, it's always been real_. The actual conditions then were laughable. A trip to Honeydukes, looking back. Things weren't very real—they were just _scary_.

Now it occurred to her, as she sat across from the boy she'd assumed was untouchable—whose mother made headlines that morning for the worst reason imaginable—that perhaps it wasn't true that the war had, by this point, never been "real" to them.

It was just that none of them could understand how these things could hurt so unbearably every time.

Lily sniffed and handed James a plate. He wiped his face before he took it.

They ate their first meal of the day together, in silence.

.

Bizarrely, but just as easily, Lily fell into a routine.

It had been a week, and a week was far too long to go without food and water—or without knowing your assignments, even, Lily figured—and seeing as she was the only one who had access to his room at all, who was allowed down that hidden corridor, she had to be the one to bring such things to him.

Most of the time she'd just leave things in front of his door. Because he didn't want to talk to her, or because it just took him so long to get up to greet her that Lily couldn't wait long enough, James didn't open up very often.

When he did, he didn't speak much. Or at all. Lily would flounder under his gaze, try to quickly assess his emotional state by his appearance—and trying to keep from looking so plainly like she was analyzing him—before handing off his potatoes or his Muggle Studies review with a smile, turning to walk back down the corridor without waiting.

She did this to avoid the jarringly unpleasant experience of James closing the door in her face, with nary a blink, a smile, any recognition that she was standing before him. It was probably rude, but it didn't seem that James had room to care. He never called after her, anyways.

The walk away always left her feeling silly, because she rarely planned to _actually_ exit to the common room.

Even if she wanted to, Lily wasn't quite sure she could stand the common room for very long, lately.

Lily used to be able to come and go through the Head's door without much commotion from pedestrians, but in the past week, she'd practically walked around with a target on her back. Lily Evans, Head Girl, was the link between _James Potter, Head Boy_, and the world at large. Heads snapped in her direction every time the door appeared; she could feel their eyes burning into her as she whispered the password, _feel_ their ears straining to hear it, though nobody seemed keen to actually facilitate an invasion.

Usually she paid them no mind.

"Lily?" She heard Remus's voice behind her as she closed the door, softly, always softly, watching it disappear. The eyes flicked towards her. They flicked away.

"Hi, Remus."

It was a common sight: he was sitting alone on the couch. There was a long stretch of parchment in his lap, a textbook at his side, but he'd obviously not been doing much work. For a moment, upon meeting her eyes, Remus looked conflicted. "Er…how's he doing in there?"

Lily blinked. It was certainly not an uncommon question—it was, in fact, an incessant, inevitable question—but she hadn't yet settled with herself the best way to answer it. Should she tell him it was a good day because he'd made eye contact with her? That was the standard she'd taken to following. Would it be worse, she worried, to let him know that things were so poor that a moment of _eye contact_ constituted a good day?

"He's alright."

Remus looked unconvinced as he shifted his neglected book, gesturing for her to sit. For some reason, though they'd always been friends, Lily was wary of the invitation. Was he only extending this little kindness to try and siphon more James information out of her?

"Doesn't seem up to everything, yet, then, does he?"

"Not quite." This felt like the strangest type of betrayal.

He nodded.

She looked away.

"Sirius is…" Remus started, his voice fainter than before, "he's not doing well with this. Euphemia being gone. James being gone. All the drama with his brother, you know, Regulus hanging around with…y'know. He isn't saying it, but it's just—" he looked down at his lap. "It's a lot."

Lily wondered how she'd been caught in the middle of this. After her months of proper evasion, all these sticky, complicated emotions, had caught up to her. All these hurting people. "I'm sorry, Remus."

He'd never been the type to speak before thinking, so the silence was long. "Can't be helped."

_Is that true?_ Lily thought, but she was far too exhausted to say it.

_Is there nothing we can do to fix things?_

_Can anything be done to help us? _

As she stood up from the couch, she felt eyes all over her. Not only Remus's; all the eyes of Gryffindor, all over her, watching her_._ Not because she was Head Girl, or because she had toilet paper sticking out of her skirt, or because they fancied her, but because they hoped that where she went, one day James would follow.

Lily was a beacon of hope.

She wished she could be more selfless about the whole thing.

.

James was dizzy.

This could mean a variety of things—he'd learnt that by now. It could mean he was hungry; it could mean he'd slept too much; it could mean that he smelled so bad it was starting to make him ill.

He knew very well to fix these things:

Go to the door and see if there was a plate waiting for him.

Get out of bed so he'd stop falling back asleep.

Take a bloody shower.

His only indication of time was the sunlight streaming—or failing to stream—through his window, and James wasn't the orienteering type.

These became his time-telling guidelines:

Sun up meant daytime, sun down meant night.

If the sky was colorful and something between the two, it was probably either dusk or dawn.

To figure out which was which, wait about an hour.

If the sun was down, it had been dusk. If the sun was up, it had been dawn.

Showering was probably a good idea, at the very least. He did stink.

But that meant getting out of bed, which was a herculean task by itself, because:

What if he was dizzy because he was hungry? He couldn't go to the door first to get food, because then Lily would smell how putrid he was. She'd already seen him so low; she couldn't see him like that.

If he went ahead and showered anyways, he might pass out in the shower, bang his head on the tile, and

Lily would probably be the one to find him, but who knows how long it would take before she started to suspect something was wrong? How many times she'd have to knock, how many plates would pile up, how many days would go by before she finally opened the door herself—he hasn't locked it once—and saw him, probably stark-naked and dead, the water still running?

_HEAD BOY JAMES POTTER DEAD AT 17; CAUSES NEED NO INVESTIGATION; DIED NAKED IN SHOWER._

He didn't mean to show up his mum, but blimey, what a headline that'd be.

James clenched his jaw at the feeling of tears crawling up behind his eyes.

He decided to just stay in bed.

The sky was in-between when he heard another knock on his door—dusk or dawn, end or beginning?—and James felt the perfectly unpleasant feeling of a day totally wasted. Of doing nothing for so long your brain rots. He was meant to be scheduling patrols with Lily, doing his bloody coursework, starting practice for the Quidditch season—which, because of some institutional shite McGonagall explained to him at the beginning of the year, had been postponed and condensed, all being fitted into spring term.

He hadn't thought about it now, but he figured now it was because of the war.

Everything was because of the war.

His jaw popped from clenching. Before he cycled through another series of lists, all of the reasons he should let himself rot, he shoved the bedcovers off of himself.

It felt like it took him ages to stand, but the sky was still in-between by the time he was on his feet. Little miracles.

Then he stood there, uncomfortably, looking lost in his own, well-used pyjamas in his own room. Thinking hard about where to go, like he didn't know the layout.

He had gotten up, he remembered faintly, to go shower, but he was right; he felt a bit funny just standing upright. When was the last time he'd left bed?

So his options became this:

Get back in bed.

Check for food at the door.

Die in the shower.

James decided without thinking, because maybe thinking wasn't doing anything, and if he took much longer the sun would set. _Or will it rise?_

He opened his bedroom door to the sight of Lily bent down to set the plate on the floor, wand poised above it. She cast warming charms on the food before she left it, he realized.

Somehow, she'd missed the opening of the door—maybe she'd forgotten it could open without her—and only glanced up when she noticed his feet in front of her. His toes were sort of hairy.

When she glanced up, the look of surprise in her eyes surprised James in turn.

_Fuck, do I smell?_

There was a lot in her eyes aside from surprise, though, as they looked him up and down, lingered on his hair and the dark stubble on his jaw.

"Hi," he said while she examined him, uncomfortable with the rustiness of his own voice. James hadn't spoken in days, not even to himself—which used to be something of a habit.

James was surprised by the sound of his own voice, but Lily's reaction certainly topped his. Her eyes blew open and she stared up at him in wonder, like he was a stray cat that'd just recited a poem, and everything weren't already so strange, James might've laughed at her reaction.

"…hi, James." Her voice wasn't very smooth either.

This was monumental, apparently, this level of interaction, because the pair stood there in silence for a long while, simply recovering from it.

"Lily?"

"Yeah?"

"What—" his voice cracked again. "What time is it?"

Lily frowned. Maybe she didn't want to have to talk to him.

Maybe he should've just waited for her to leave and taken the plate then.

He probably smelled.

"It's about six, I think. In the evening," she added.

He nodded. "And, er, what day is it?"

This question, which James thought would be the more egregious, left Lily unfazed. "Tuesday."

"Has it only been two days?" He asked. That couldn't have been right, could it?

She shook her head quickly, anxiously, looking down at her feet. "Ah…it's the next week from then."

He appreciated the way she delivered this news. No apologies, or dancing around the matter, or pitying expressions. That was one of the things on one of the lists that kept him in his room: the condolences he'd have to receive when he went outside. He'd hated—_hated—_that moment the last time he stepped out into the common room, seeing everybody mourning and having to be told they were mourning for him, and he couldn't stand to face another.

True, her avoiding his eyes stung a bit, but that wasn't specific to this scenario; she'd done that plenty before now, and it always felt that way.

He'd taken too long to respond. Lily was searching his face now.

"Right."

Lily bit her lip. "Yeah."

"Well, er…" He ran a hand through his hair. "G'night, then, Lily."

Her expression was a mix of a million undecipherable things, and James was lacking in the presence of mind to decipher it; he'd already be caught on the handful of words they'd exchanged for the rest of the night without worrying about the furrow of her brow and the light in her eyes.

"Good night, James."

She left before he could close the door.

James ate the food she'd left him. It tasted kind of nice.

Then he took a shower.

.

"She's coming towards us, yeah?"

"Of course she is. Why else would she be coming out?"

The weather wasn't nearly as bitter today, but it was still November. The Great Lake wasn't crawling with students desperate to get out of their dorms; it wouldn't be again until April, at the earliest.

That wasn't enough to discourage Sirius and Marlene, though.

And apparently, not enough to discourage Lily, either.

"Well, she hasn't said hello. Maybe she's coming out to brood?"

"She would've turned around when she noticed us. Lily never wants company when she's brooding."

"Fair enough."

Lily was definitely walking towards the pair, but her gaze was fixed on her feet as she approached. Sirius didn't like how waifish she looked; he was too busy with all the other shit in his life to worry about to add her to the list.

He had a feeling there were plenty enough people worrying about Lily Evans already, anyways.

"Everything alright, Lily?" Marlene called out, not waiting for her friend to take the last few steps to meet them. Case in point. Lily smiled wanly and wrapped her arms around herself.

It wasn't that cold out.

"I'm fine, thanks," she answered. Her eyes were set on Sirius. "I just—I thought I really ought to speak to you."

He frowned, took a drag before responding. "What about?"

"James." The tone of her voice was frustrating in a way he couldn't pin down. She was—it was too earnest, too kind, too gentle—too much like she was doing him a _favor_, like she was the damned authority on the subject. He swallowed her gaze away, turned his attention to his cigarette, breathed in too deeply and held the smoke too long. He let the black feeling linger.

Marlene was frowning now. At him, he realized. "What about him?"

_Is he alright? Is he eating, is he sleeping, is he breathing? Is he alright?_

"He's doing okay. Figured you should know."

Sirius flicked away his ash. _Is he eating, is he sleeping, is he breathing?_

"Y'know. Eats the food I bring, right. Talks more than he used to. Don't think he's showered in a bit—definitely hasn't shaved—but…he's alive. He's alright." Then Lily stood in her own silence, peering up at him, her face expectant and apologetic at the same time.

Sirius didn't want to hate her, he didn't think, but he didn't want to feel bad for her either. Maybe he just didn't want to be around this girl—this unexpectedly mysterious girl, this girl who always seemed to be in one melancholy or another, this girl who'd got hold of James and didn't even _want _him half the time. This girl who had all of him.

"Appreciate it, Evans," he said with a shiver he couldn't will away.

"I wish you could be there." She muttered, her gaze sweeping out across the lake, the way Sirius did sometimes. Hers seemed less rehearsed. "James…I mean, he's on his own most of the time. It's just me—"

Like he didn't know that.

"—and I think…I really think he needs his mates. He needs something normal. I'm alright, or—I guess I'm just doing my best, I'm trying, but I…I'm not really enough for him right now, don't think."

Some girly, jealous part of Sirius spent too much time fixated on the _"right now"_. It was kind of a threat—even though it obviously wasn't, even though he had nothing even _close_ to a rational reason to feel threatened by _Lily Evans_—but part of him preened at her assessment, anyways. James did need them.

At the beginning of the term, the Marauders tried everything they could to get into the corridor, excited by the possibilities a hidden room, protected as thoroughly as a common room, would offer them. Nothing in their bag of tricks-nor the tricks they'd added in the process—got past it.

Sirius knew the password; he knew exactly where the mark sat on that blasted wall. Every time he heard her whisper the password, blocking the view of her fingers with her body, and watched the door shrink away behind her, he had to fight not to go mad with the pretense of it all.

"_Don't tell Evans we tried this, yeah? Figure I shouldn't give her any extra reasons to blow her lid."_

"I wish I could be there, too."

That was the most he could concede, and maybe it wasn't really a concession at all, but he'd gone the entire time without blowing smoke in her face, either, and Sirius was all about the little victories lately.

"Right, well…see you lot in Herbology, I guess." Lily smiled a pretty smile again, turning back to the castle with the air of something else on her mind.

"If the prat shows up," Marlene called after her. "See you, Lily!" Then she turned on him.

"What's got such a stick up your arse?"

Sirius immediately felt defensive. "Fuck off."

"No, really, since when do you have a problem with Lily?" She sounded as bitchy as she usually did, none of the honey—or lack of venom, rather—that she'd had a moment ago.

For obvious reasons.

"Fuck off, I do not," He objected, but he knew it was clearly ingenuine.

Marlene huffed, rolling her eyes, looking more annoyed than offended. "If you're just being catty because she's shut up with James and you can't get in, I suggest you get your chin up and stop acting like a bloody child about it."

"Merlin, Price, sure aren't sparing any feelings today—"

"It's not her fault, you prat."

"Is this…" Sirius waved his cigarette hand around in the fashion of somebody searching for a word. He hated himself for it, kind of. "This onslaught meant to make me feel better?" He landed on, taking one last drag.

Marlene rolled her eyes and started off towards the castle. Didn't even wait for him to stomp out the butt.

"You aren't the only one in this castle who's miserable lately, Sirius. Sorry if you hadn't noticed."

Lily was an orange dot in the distance, but it still looked to Sirius as if Marlene was following her.

.

"Am I being a prat?"

The late nights the seventh years spent in the common room weren't very late at all anymore. Adam and Marlene didn't show some nights—snogging in the boy's dorm while it was empty, he theorized—and Mary didn't stay out on the couches until she passed out from exhaustion anymore, though the smudges under her eyes were still severe enough to look like bruises some days. James was, well, locked away, and perhaps Lily was sitting dutifully outside of his door, like she probably did every night, waiting for signs of life.

A year ago, none of them could've imagined a universe where _she_ doted on _him_. None of them.

Sirius really needed to stop bothering himself thinking about Lily.

"Generally speaking, yes." Remus replied.

So, reasonable hour aside, they were already alone for the night. Something about it—the sounds of chatter from the dormitories around them, or the sight of the sky not yet graying with the suggestion of morning—made them uncomfortable, less at home. They sat side by side, hands entwined, not doing much.

"Moony." Sirius said seriously, turning to look into his boyfriend's tired blue eyes.

He sighed. "Sort of. Lately."

"I haven't spoken to either of them in more than a week."

The fire muttered quietly in front of them.

"The last time I saw Regulus he was hanging around those fucking snakes again."

It popped.

"I could fix everything if I could just bloody talk to them."

"Could you?" Remus finally responded.

"I could—I could help James through it. I knew his mum better than anyone—save him, of course, you know—but I know what he's lost. And Regulus, I could talk him out of this shit he's got into—"

"That's been your strategy for five years, Sirius," he interrupted softly, like he didn't want to say it—because he didn't.

Sirius clenched his jaw. "I just want them to be okay."

"Me, too, Padfoot. It's what we all want," he said with another sigh, heavier than the last, though somehow weaker, too. "We just…We don't have control over these things."

It made Sirius feel cagey, not having any control. He wasn't used to being so trapped. When his parents yelled at him too much as a child, he'd grab a broom and fly off—for days, even, one time when he was ten. When Hogwarts tried to box him in, intimidate him with its shifting paths, its secret hallways, he'd made a map to lay it out bare. When his house began to feel so stifling he couldn't breathe, when he didn't want to be in his vicious, poisonous family anymore, he'd simply run away. Got himself blasted off the family tree.

"Then what am I supposed to do?" He tried to keep the desperation out of his voice.

Remus rubbed his thumb over their linked fingers absently. "Wait."

"I hate that," Sirius said, setting his head on the other boy's shoulder not because he was drowsy, but rather with a vain hope that it might lessen the pressure of all the thoughts weighing down his mind.

Remus could feel the jaw clenched and twitching against his sweater; he could feel the wet heat of tears, too, so he didn't look down. "I know."

They both heard a door open behind them. Sirius's head jerked up at the same time that Remus pulled his hand towards his own lap, separating their hands; their attention snapped to the sound.

James stood by the wall where a door had obviously been, looking rather blank.

"Prongs?" Sirius asked excitedly. Vulnerably, even, but he didn't have the mind to care. Then he remembered that he'd been crying and scrubbed a hand over his face, cartoonishly, like he was trying to change emotions altogether. Remus found his unused hand, laced their fingers right back up.

James nodded slightly and moved towards the couch.

The moment was blown open, unusually real; Sirius was impressed by how well-defined James looked in his eyesight, like he'd expected the sight of James to be blurry after so long.

Sirius waited for James to fall down onto the sofa heavily—that was typical of James—but instead, the James sat slowly, quietly. He barely dented the cushion.

James. Prongs. He was here, even if it wasn't very obvious yet.

"Long time no see," he grinned. James responded with a malnourished smile. Before Sirius could say anything else, which he certainly planned on doing he felt Remus squeeze his hand.

_Not now_, his blue eyes read. He was no longer the most tired person in the room.

The night was young, but Sirius and Remus sat there with James—who did little more than blink, breathe, stare at the fire—until he retired, the sky hinting at gray.

**Oh god I'm in college now, and I'm constantly overloaded. If I explained all of the stuff I have to do it would read like a resume. I haven't written for fun in forever. Since before summer. And I've had this chapter almost entirely written this entire time, but I was never happy with it, so it's sat in my documents, unloved, until the past two days where I edited it with what may be an entirely different writing style from the rest of the story and posted it. Right now. Nobody really reads this story, but I like it, so I'm going to finish it eventually. Swear to god.**


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